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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... 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 fragments, and their attempts to make the past, or the ...
... it , even doubling it . For this reason , ruins and fragments occupy an important place in the first part of this study : they configure - visibly — a relationship between something present and something either out of sight.
Fragments, History, Spectacle Sophie Thomas. relationship between something present and something either out of sight or lost to view , and engage the imagination in supplementary ways . The next chapter , on Keats's fragmentary Hyperion ...
... present, either to the eye or to the understanding. The fragment, much like the attention to the visual in literature of the Romantic period, figures forth the distance between desire and actuality, between the discontinuous ...
... present object . Edmund Burke , in his treatise of 1757 , had identified obscurity , vastness , infinity , and terror as key producers of sublime effects , and these were rapidly absorbed into eighteenth- century aesthetic discourse ...
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 | |