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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... Past Rome : Ruins , History , Museums 5 Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight 6 Making Visible : The Diorama , the Double , and the Gothic Subject 7 Seeing Things ( " As They Are " ) : Coleridge , Schiller , and the play of ...
... past, or the historical, appear in the present. From the mock-ruins of the later eighteenth century, to views of Rome in the Romantic period, to the popularity of scenes of Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these ...
... forth the distance between desire and actuality, between the discontinuous temporalities of present and past, and between the visible and the visualizable, in imaginative or conceptual terms. 2 ' Shadows of a Magnitude ' Keats , Fragments.
... past , to see it into the future . History , memory , temporality : these are all important factors in the way fragmentation informs visuality in Keats's poems , and underscore the poet's anxiety about the value and the ultimate fate of ...
... past . In such cases , fragments contributed much to historical reconstruction , and to an increasing awareness of the importance of historical knowledge . The fragment is in these instances a visual motif , but one rich with ...
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 | |