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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... material of these chapters is largely physical. In other chapters however, the literary engagement with the visual is emphasized, and the subjects of these chapters range from Wordsworth and Shelley's different modes of visual idealism ...
... material and thematic. In the Romantic period, this preoccupation takes on apparently distinct forms: in a thriving visual culture that trades on (and trumps) prevailing aesthetic models, and in a literary culture that, at first sight ...
... material way, the very nature and limits of visuality. Adapting a formulation from W. J. T. Mitchell's recent study, What Do Pictures Want?, I argue that what is at stake is how seeing itself should be seen—and shown.8 Recent studies ...
... material world is no sooner seen , he claims , than it is imaginatively appropriated - as , for example , in the poetic subjectivity dramatised by Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey ” that “ half- perceives and half creates . " The effect of ...
... material , the theorization and the fabrication of the visible . This would confirm the argument that seeing , or vision , is culturally constructed , and therefore caught up in the history of the mediation of the visual - in practices ...
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 | |