Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, SpectacleRoutledge, 2007 M12 12 - 246 pages This book investigates the productive crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the Romantic period, focusing on the construction and manipulation of the visual, the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible. It examines a broad selection of instances that reflect debates over how seeing should itself be viewed: instances, from Daguerre's Diorama, to the staging of Coleridge's play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley's poetry and at the Phantasmagoria, in which the very act of seeing is represented or dramatized. In reconsidering literary engagements with the expanding visual field, this study argues that the popular culture of Regency Britain reflected not just emergent and highly capitalized forms of mass entertainment, but also a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. What is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible gives way to a generative fascination with the visual and its imaginative--even spectacular--possibilities. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 86
... example, with its clever creation of visual illusions, made its manipulations of the visible part of the show; and in many other contexts that I examine, both visual and textual, the act of seeing receives special emphasis by being ...
... example of the problems both of describing and of understanding , or comprehending , a description . The greater the number of details , he suggests , the greater is the difference between the actual image and the one imagined by the ...
... example, in The Shock of the Real, points to a widening gulf between Romantic theories of artistic production that emphasized original genius and an idealized view of the imagination, and a burgeoning visual culture industry that traded ...
... example , in the poetic subjectivity dramatised by Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey ” that “ half- perceives and half creates . " The effect of that imaginative appropriation , by which the visible becomes the Freudian " familiar thing that ...
... example , however , of how visual paradigms can structure specific readings of Romantic texts . Anne McWhir , comparing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to her later novel , The Last Man , suggests contrasting visual modes characteristic of ...
Contents
The Fragment in Ruins | |
Ruins History Museums | |
Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight | |
The Diorama the Double and the Gothic Subject | |
Coleridge Schiller and the play of Semblance | |
Shelley Medusa and the Phantasmagoria | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |