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 47
... popular culture of Regency Britain, with its phantasmagorias, panoramas, and dioramas, was driven not simply by the economic potential of newly profitable modes of mass entertainment, but also by a lively interest in the aesthetic and ...
... popularity of scenes of Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these chapters is largely physical. In other chapters however, the literary engagement with the visual is emphasized, and the subjects of these chapters range ...
... popular exhibition , after which the museum was renamed the " Egyptian Hall , " staged a lurid and sensational mock - up of tombs , statues , and sarcophagi recently excavated from the Valley of the Kings . The eye of the visitor was ...
... popular visual culture and the discourse of the visual in literary contexts, and I contend that the division between literature's apparent emphasis on the imagination over spectacle, often configured as a form of idealism versus ...
... popular at the end of the eighteenth century . The founding premises and viewing practices associated with the picturesque and the popular spectacle of the panorama relate explicitly to what might be called " sight - specific " viewing ...
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 | |