Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers Into Spectators'Clarendon Press, 2006 M12 21 - 259 pages Fuseli's Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli's project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other 'classics' in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformedinto repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national 'grand style' to fit the needs of a consumer society.Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To 'turn readers into spectators' meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli's Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses,let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli's embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This bookanalyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period. |
From inside the book
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Page 27
... claim to further the public enjoyment and public ownership of art works . If eighteenth - century art treatises had attributed the lack of British historical painting to that of aristocratic or royal patronage , the literary galleries ...
... claim to further the public enjoyment and public ownership of art works . If eighteenth - century art treatises had attributed the lack of British historical painting to that of aristocratic or royal patronage , the literary galleries ...
Page 45
... claim , whose exhibition we consider as a national honour , and we are happy to find that all ranks of people have sufficient taste to admire , and liberality to encourage 108 it . In 1790 Fuseli counted on the private sector , whereas ...
... claim , whose exhibition we consider as a national honour , and we are happy to find that all ranks of people have sufficient taste to admire , and liberality to encourage 108 it . In 1790 Fuseli counted on the private sector , whereas ...
Page 186
... claim that Paradise Lost lacked human passions and hence would fail to engage readers , an issue all the more pressing in a commercial enterprise predicated on calling upon such readers to become spectators . To contradict Samuel ...
... claim that Paradise Lost lacked human passions and hence would fail to engage readers , an issue all the more pressing in a commercial enterprise predicated on calling upon such readers to become spectators . To contradict Samuel ...
Contents
Printed Text at | 58 |
Visual Bookkeeping | 99 |
Visual Narratives | 105 |
Copyright | |
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Fuseli's Milton Gallery:'Turning Readers into Spectators': 'Turning Readers ... Luisa Cale No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
action Adam and Eve Adam's Advertiser aesthetic allegory angels anthologies Apollo Belvedere argued Artists beauty Bentley body Boydell Boydell's British Burke's Cambridge Coleridge Cowper culture Death E. V. Lucas edition Eidophusikon Eisenstein embodied engraved entries epic Essay Eve's excerpts exhibition space female figure Fuseli's Fuseli's Milton Gallery G. E. Lessing Gallery catalogue gender Henry Fuseli Historic Gallery History identify illustrated images imagination John Milton Johnson Joseph Joseph Johnson Laocoön Lapland LAPLAND ORGIES late eighteenth-century literary galleries literature London Mary Wollstonecraft Milton Gallery Milton's allegory mind montage movement narrative oil on canvas Oxford painters painting Paradise Lost plot Poetical poetry posture practices Priestley prints prospectus public sphere published readers into spectators reading Reynolds Reynolds's Royal Academy Royal Academy exhibition Satan scene sequence Shakespeare Shakspeare Gallery shape story sublime textual touch of Ithuriel's trans Unitarian Venus viewers viewing vision vols Wollstonecraft women