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 35
... Paul de Philipsthal , 1802 Showbill . Reproduced courtesy of The Magic Lantern Society . Thomas Rowlandson , The Contrast , 1792. © The Trustees of the British Museum . Figure William Dent , The French Feast of Reason ,
... Reason , or the Cloven - Foot Triumphant , December , 1793. The Trustees of the British Museum . 8.6 . Figure Isaac Cruikshank , A Peace Offering to the Genius of Liberty and Equality , February 1794 . The Trustees of the British Museum ...
... , conditioning 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.
... reasons , which also enhanced the power of the illusion . One , for example , was the difference between the represented distance of the painted scene and the relative proximity to the viewer of the painted wall . Another was the sheer ...
... reasons expensive , and reached a relatively narrow audience ; until the Illustrated LondonNews was launched in 1842 , and until periodicals that could include photographs emerged later in the century , the panorama served a purpose not ...
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 | |