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. |
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Contents
Turning Readers into Spectators | 1 |
1 The Literary Galleries and the Field of Art | 16 |
Printed Text at the Galleries | 58 |
Visual Narratives | 105 |
Miltons Allegory and the Politics of Seeing | 142 |
5 The Plot of Adam and Eve | 184 |
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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 angels anthologies Apollo Belvedere argued Artists beauty Bentley Blake’s body Bowyer’s Boydell Boydell’s British Burke’s Cambridge Coleridge continuous Cowper culture Death depicted dynamic edition Eidophusikon Eisenstein engraved enjambement entries epic Essay Eve’s excerpts exhibition space female figure Fuseli’s Fuseli’s Milton Gallery Henry Fuseli Historic Gallery History identify illustrated images imagination James’s Joseph Johnson King’s Laocoön Lapland late eighteenth-century Lessing’s literary galleries literature London Macklin’s Mary Wollstonecraft Milton Gallery Milton’s allegory Milton’s poem mind montage movement narrative offered oil on canvas Oxford painters painting Paradise Lost plot Poetical poetry political practices Priestley prints prospectus public sphere published readers into spectators reading regicide Reynolds Reynolds’s Roscoe Royal Academy Royal Academy exhibition Satan scene sequence Shakespeare Shakspeare Gallery shape simile Somerset House story sublime supernatural textual Unitarian viewers viewing vision vols Wollstonecraft