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 105
... visual narrative explored by theorists alongside dictionary entries , developments in museum layouts as well as the visual spectacles of the day : magic lanterns , panoramas , and the Eidophusikon . In The Shows of London ( 1978 ) ...
... visual narrative explored by theorists alongside dictionary entries , developments in museum layouts as well as the visual spectacles of the day : magic lanterns , panoramas , and the Eidophusikon . In The Shows of London ( 1978 ) ...
Page 106
... visual arts in their attempt to represent an action in its making . By trying to freeze an image in its pregnant moment , visual narrative exemplifies the paradox of moving immobility explored by the Greek philosopher Zeno : ' the arrow ...
... visual arts in their attempt to represent an action in its making . By trying to freeze an image in its pregnant moment , visual narrative exemplifies the paradox of moving immobility explored by the Greek philosopher Zeno : ' the arrow ...
Page 126
... visual culture . My key concern is to elucidate the collaborative work of spectators , reconstructing the activities and skills required for such visual entertainments to produce the aesthetic effects perceived at the time . The range of ...
... visual culture . My key concern is to elucidate the collaborative work of spectators , reconstructing the activities and skills required for such visual entertainments to produce the aesthetic effects perceived at the time . The range of ...
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