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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... relation to the seen (the merely visible), but for the pervasive ambivalence that inflects treatments of the visual at this time. Anxiety about seeing arguably stands in for broader anxieties, such as those regarding historical truth ...
... relation of the visible to the imaginary , but because the audience for whom Diderot was writing did not and probably would not ever see the original artworks for themselves . His Salon commentaries were thus a substitute , a supplement ...
... relationship of eye to brain, to new optical instruments and technologies of spectatorship. Flint's interest is as much in the problem of decipherment as in practices of observation: in an awareness of the limits of vision, and the ...
... relationship of visual deception to the ethical rehabilitation of the play's villain in Remorse is not simply a theme , but a self - conscious feature of the play's ( visual ) proceedings . Much of the apparently negative reaction to ...
... relation to visuality than first “ appears , ” but with one important caveat . The visual doesn't simply return in the Romantic period like that repressed other , but is made . Its apparent basis in the " real " is one of the important ...
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 | |