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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... memory, fragmentation, time, and historicity. These themes are related to acts of “making visible” and are implicit in the attention throughout to the border between the visible and the invisible. Nowhere though is this border more ...
... " announces " the modern conditions of art viewing , which remain largely dependent on memory : full comprehension of the work of art can be arrived at Introduction: Regarding Visuality-From the Picturesque to the Panorama.
... memory, but also in recognition of the loss of the object.2 An invisible painting of a ruin—invisible, that is, to Diderot's imagined reader—is a potent reminder of that distance. But this small (very small) narrative points in another ...
... memory, which Flint suggests operated on Victorian sensibilities as a powerful legacy of Romanticism. Clearly, the turn toward the invisible that animated the nineteenth century—as a cultural preoccupation and a source of anxiety—has ...
... memory , while commenting , no doubt , on the accuracy of the representation . Scenes of current or recent important events - Barker's Battle of Waterloo was a major success of this kind - served nationalist interest while offering ...
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 | |