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. |
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... 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 have begun to explore the ...
... nature " as " loathsome " and " disgusting " ( 3 ) ; the deceptions of a copy or " Fac Simile " of the real were not only disappointing , but at an extreme , potentially " shocking . " Technologically contrived illusionism , such as ...
... nature it beheld was already , in any case , an image . This image of nature , as Schneider suggests , " offered itself to the spectator who , by claiming to be caught unawares by it , turned it into a hidden spectacle for his surprised ...
... natural beauty entail? According to Adorno, “For it, nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labour and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of ...
... nature,” made to look most “'like herself,'” but at the same time, to appear as a spontaneous presentation or offering to the human onlooker.28 The most surprising and natural-seeming vista is thus likely to be the most mediated ...
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 | |