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
Results 1-5 of 71
... mind's apparent mastery of the real . The visible is not merely absent from ( or , an absence in ) the aesthetic ideology of high Romanticism , but is rather that something " whose essential nothingness is both provisional and ...
... mind's eye , " reveals " an intrinsic unexamined equivalence between the technology of illusion and supernatural phenomena . " From the earliest seventeenth - century engravings of the lantern in action , the projected images commonly ...
... mind of the beholder , as a Landscape on a Convex Mirror . Coleridge , here , would also seem to have Hartley's theory of associationism in mind , which sought to articulate the mechanism by which the physical or material world ...
... mind " In absolute dominion ” ( 171-75 ) . Distracted by the visible , by the “ meager novelties / Of colour and proportion , " he finds himself to be " to the moods / Of Nature , and the spirit of the place , / Less sensible ” ( 160-63 ) ...
... mind aspires to but is unable to achieve, at least not now, and as the “perfect” Romantic form_ the most appropriate signifier of sublime, visionary excess. The theoretical problems and enticements of the fragment were an important part ...
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 | |