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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... illusions, made its manipulations of the visible part of the show; and in many other contexts that I examine, both ... illusion, the counterfeit and the status of the real, appear to have become more pressing, and more difficult to ...
... illusion makes possible , and embraces rather willingly the sensational new contrivances of Georgian stagecraft . The relationship of visual deception to the ethical rehabilitation of the play's villain in Remorse is not simply a theme ...
... illusion and supernatural phenomena . " From the earliest seventeenth - century engravings of the lantern in action , the projected images commonly featured supernatural beings , leering devils , dancing skeletons , and so on , a ...
... illusion for the ' eye of the soul , ' the imagination or ' Einbildungskraft , ' which was tantamount to actual seeing . " This verbal image , moreover , was said to be more powerful than the visual image in its capacity to stimulate ...
... illusion ( see Figure 1.3 ) . The most popular subjects of the panoramas of Barker and his competitors were imposing landscapes , such as the Alps ; cities of particular cultural or historic note , often associated with the Grand Tour ...
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 | |