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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... whole broad and sweeping: “The province of the picturesque eye is to survey nature; not to anatomize matter. It throws its glances around in the broad-cast stile. It comprehends an extensive tract at each sweep. It examines parts, but ...
... whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour.” 27 Paradoxically, the eighteenth-century landscape garden comes to epitomize the “arrangement of the scene of nature,” made to look most “'like herself,'” but at the same ...
... whole an idealized and universal quality . This was thought to be helpful because of deficits in the physiology of vision : we cannot , Gilpin maintained , grasp simultaneously both the foreground and the background of a scene , or ...
... whole creative powers of man " ( 7.659-69 , 655 ) . The shows " within doors " also receive their due : " birds and beasts / Of every nature , and strange plants convened / From every clime " ( 1850 ; 7.230–32 ) . And following on from ...
... whole horizon on all sides , ” and plants us Wordsworth's lines capture the mixture of entrancement and deception that made the panorama so appealing , and fed the debate about its legitimacy as an art form . It was , certainly , an ...
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 | |