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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... the new visual media. This interest in the broader problems encapsulated and re-presented by the visual was also highly productive. I argue that what is commonly thought to be the Romantic Preface and Acknowledgments.
... problems both of describing and of understanding , or comprehending , a description . The greater the number of details , he suggests , the greater is the difference between the actual image and the one imagined by the reader : a ...
... problem of decipherment as in practices of observation: in an awareness of the limits of vision, and the tantalizing presence of the unseen, which even inventions such as the 6 microscope and the photograph did little to resolve. Flint.
... problem with most images of the real (apparent in many otherwise successful trompe l'oeil paintings) is the inevitable boundary, the frame, which isolates what it shows, and reveals it as only part of a total object, a restricted ...
... central epistemological problem at the heart of the very conception of totality : for as Byron lamented in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , " Thou seest not all , but piecemeal 'Shadows of a Magnitude': Keats, Fragments, and Vision.
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 | |