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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... looking. If at this time the English became a nation of “starers” I suggest that this was because the creation and control of the visual field was part of the novelty, part of what was being made and presented as spectacular. Daguerre's ...
... looking becomes a more conscious and culturally inflected act, with a range of new practices and forms of representation: looking itself becomes visible. At the other end of the Romantic period, in Victorian Britain, a powerful ...
... looking had become, as noted above, highly mediated and self-conscious, is particularly evident in how it became itself the focus of numerous visual representations: in the often satiric prints of the crowded summer exhibitions at the ...
... looking. The picturesque called for variety and contrast, and emphasized the effects of light and shade, the introduction of novelty, and a style of execution that was broad and free (see Figure 1.1). In his essay on picturesque beauty ...
... looking at landscapes. These were brought to bear upon their own estates, creating entirely new prospects along the lines of classical models.26 It is reductive perhaps, but not far from the mark, to argue that the so-called discovery ...
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 | |