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. |
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... , and sustained me in turn with their charm, inventiveness, and humour. To Julian, for love, friendship and intellectual collaboration over many happy years, I owe everything. List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 . William Gilpin , A.
... turn of the nineteenth century. This book is not concerned with optics, or with the science of vision as such.3 Rather, it investigates a variety of instances in literature and visual culture where “seeing” becomes a preoccupation that ...
... turn toward the invisible that animated the nineteenth century—as a cultural preoccupation and a source of anxiety—has its roots in preceding decades. These decades, spanning roughly the period 1780 to 1825, saw increased attention to ...
... turn, reflected interest in other forms of circular vision, such as panopticism, with its extension to include the ... turns out to have a central place. The picturesque is not simply, when examined closely, about the duplication of the ...
... turn next, the fragment, where what is absent—thus invisible— haunts and conditions what is present, either to the eye or to the understanding. The fragment, much like the attention to the visual in literature of the Romantic period ...
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 | |