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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... painting by L. J. M. Daguerre , published in The Mirror of Literature , 1826 , Vol . 7 , p . 129. © The British Library Board . All rights reserved ( PP.5681 ) . Figure Medusa , painted on a leather jousting shield , c . 1596-1598 ( oil ...
... painting by Hubert Robert . These are just the first sentences of a skilful verbal sketch that takes its reader ... painting . Diderot , however , uses this instance — it is not clear whether it is the painting or his description itself ...
... 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 of the visible is ...
... paintings.12 The relationship between painting , literature , and culture is taken up at length in Christopher Rovee's Imagining the Gallery : The Social Body of British Romanticism , where he finds in visual culture , and in the ...
... painting inhabits the theatre for Coleridge , illuminating anxieties about dramatic illusion , or in how ruins become the image of invisible history in Rome , or how vision becomes the content of the visibly sculptural for Keats . In ...
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 | |