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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... kind of negative index or symptom . I agree that the repudiation of the visual masks a far more complex relation to visuality than first “ appears , ” but with one important caveat . The visual doesn't simply return in the Romantic ...
... kind of observer , one capable of a sort of " primal opticality , " a " purified subjective vision " ( 95 ) -one who , finally , can really . This ideal is pushed to its limit in Ruskin's claim , in Modern Painters , that " hundreds of ...
... kind . ... upon some lofty pinnacle Or in a ship on waters , with a world Of life and lifelike mockery to east , To west , beneath , behind us , and before [ . ] ( 7.258-64 ) The panorama became a hugely popular phenomenon , and after ...
... kind of progress upon the other, but to show that they are both (if in different, and perhaps even inverse ways) engaged in a similar undertaking: the representation of the visible, using strategies and devices that foreground both of ...
... kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never perfected” (AF 116). The fragment thus comes, in its apparent affinities to a larger Romantic project, to ...
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 | |