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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... historical truth and knowledge, and the purpose and longevity of art. Questions mediated by visual evidence, such as aesthetic illusion, the counterfeit and the status of the real, appear to have become more pressing, and more difficult ...
... historical, appear in the present. From the mock-ruins of the later eighteenth century, to views of Rome in the Romantic period, to the popularity of scenes of Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these chapters is largely ...
... historical context and setting , as one might encounter it at the more up - market Elgin Marbles Gallery , newly opened in the British Museum ( 2 ) . It was , Wood argues , precisely in the face of widespread public fascination with ...
... historic note , often associated with the Grand Tour , such as Rome , Pompeii , Athens , and Constantinople ; and important contemporary events , particularly wars , where battles and naval scenes fed nationalist interest . A good ...
... historical , literary , and theoretical features . The second part of the chapter considers at length , as an extended example , the relationship of fragmentation to visuality in Keats's unfinished Hyperion poems , focusing on the ...
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 | |