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 80
... object (or indeed an idea) is simultaneously absent and present, engaging the viewer with a tangible and visible limit, beyond which she or he is invited but may not pass. Chapters in the earlier part of this study focus on ruins and ...
... object " 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.
... 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, though related direction: to the way the question ...
... object of representation and of collective fantasy” (8). Portraiture is shown to be an important conceptual category, and a powerful metaphor, as well as a “ubiquitous form of print culture” (10). The space of the exhibition gallery ...
... objects are not, Gilpin argues, those that please naturally (which are merely beautiful), but those containing a particular quality capable of illustration through painting (Gilpin, 3). Rough and rugged textures were to be preferred to ...
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 | |