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 26
... ideal visuality , one might say , rather than antivisuality as such . Coleridge's apparent repudiation of the visible in the form of sensational realism is part of a wider resistance to the visible that is also explored by William ...
... ideal content for an unmediated act of aesthetic intuition , a fascinating paradox emerges : while the aesthetics of illusionism strove toward an unmediated representation of the world , the view of nature it beheld was already , in any ...
... ideal is pushed to its limit in Ruskin's claim , in Modern Painters , that " hundreds of people can talk for one who can think , but thousands can think for one who can see . To see clearly is poetry , prophecy and religion - all in one ...
... ideal . While it appears to take on , through the Romantic period , a certain generic uniformity , the fragment must also be seen as the form of formlessness , as that which challenges and indeed deforms form . The fragment became ...
... ideal form for the Ideal, so to speak, the elusive “literary absolute.” 13 Their fragments play explicitly on a dynamic of complete incompletion, insofar as each fragment is thought to enfold completion and incompletion within itself ...
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 | |