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
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... experience that was often aligned with vulgar visual novelty . And yet this is only one side of the coin . As I argue in Chapter 7 , Coleridge , in staging Remorse , displays a profound interest in the epistemological and aesthetic ...
... experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images.” 21 Natural and artistic beauty are, in this way, “bound up”—as are shifting modes of perception. Scenery that had once evoked disgust (such as mountain scenery22 ) ...
... experience represented and recommended by the text . Romantics writers , by contrast , are generally claimed to have been more drawn to the poetics of the sublime , and they were often scathing about the picturesque , largely because of ...
... experience diurnal or even seasonal effects all at once, or in rapid succession. The field of the visual could thus be manipulated in a manner that anticipated the effects created by the technology of the diorama. It also meant that the ...
... experience made possible with Claude mirrors and glasses, contributed to the increasing vagueness of the category “picturesque” by the early nineteenth century, and its decreasing popularity. The fall from favour of the Claude mirror ...
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 | |