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 99
... turn confronted with the task of composition , having to build a path and plot their way from one scene to the next . Turning gaps and interruptions into continuities involves various shapes of cohesion . In some cases , the plot is ...
... turn confronted with the task of composition , having to build a path and plot their way from one scene to the next . Turning gaps and interruptions into continuities involves various shapes of cohesion . In some cases , the plot is ...
Page 157
... turn is multiplied for the length of four pictures . Initially , SATAN encount'ring DEATH , SIN Interposing ( MG 5 ) was planned as a companion piece for Satan flying up from Sin and Death on his Enterprise , for they were listed one ...
... turn is multiplied for the length of four pictures . Initially , SATAN encount'ring DEATH , SIN Interposing ( MG 5 ) was planned as a companion piece for Satan flying up from Sin and Death on his Enterprise , for they were listed one ...
Page 215
... turn identified in readers a constituency of viewers , and in subscriptions for literary prints and texts a way of funding historical and epic painting . The cultural practices emerging from this new culture of exhibitions and ...
... turn identified in readers a constituency of viewers , and in subscriptions for literary prints and texts a way of funding historical and epic painting . The cultural practices emerging from this new culture of exhibitions and ...
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