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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... perhaps it would be more accurate to state that " the field of the imagination is inversely proportioned to that of the eye " ( 202 ) . These are important reflections , not only for their attempt to think through the relation of the ...
... perhaps more prevalent drive toward specularity. Interest in the unconscious, in mysteries of identity, in what lies buried under cities such as London: all of these suggest a potent threat implicit in the presence of the invisible. 7 ...
... perhaps with a doubled or mirrored subject , " while the scope and content of The Last Man evokes the apocalyptic panorama of John Martin's paintings.12 The relationship between painting , literature , and culture is taken up at length ...
... perhaps that spectators at the literary galleries became collaborators, whose new “reading” skills were honed by the experiments and expectations of other visual entertainments. This study investigates further the potent cross-currents ...
... perhaps, but not far from the mark, to argue that the so-called discovery of scenery, the evolution of the English idea of landscape, derives from the imitation of seventeenth-century Italian and Dutch painting. Indeed, there is an ...
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 | |