Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators'Clarendon Press, 2006 M12 21 - 292 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 transformed into 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 book analyses 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 v
... late Senior Tutor Clare Drury was a source of inspiration, comfort, and friendship. I wish she were here to see the printed shape of things so often discussed. This book goes to press as my intellectual life is enriched by the creative ...
... late Senior Tutor Clare Drury was a source of inspiration, comfort, and friendship. I wish she were here to see the printed shape of things so often discussed. This book goes to press as my intellectual life is enriched by the creative ...
Page 5
... late eighteenth-century London, my work investigates how this culture of exhibitions redefines visual and verbal interactions, and ways of reading and viewing. 'Turning readers into spectators' is the joint task of language and pictures ...
... late eighteenth-century London, my work investigates how this culture of exhibitions redefines visual and verbal interactions, and ways of reading and viewing. 'Turning readers into spectators' is the joint task of language and pictures ...
Page 6
... Late Eighteenth-Century London', Ph.D. thesis (London, 2003); on Bowyer, see R. W. Hutton, 'Robert Bowyer and the Historic Gallery: A Study of the Creation of a Magnificent Work to Promote the Arts in England', Ph.D. thesis (Chicago ...
... Late Eighteenth-Century London', Ph.D. thesis (London, 2003); on Bowyer, see R. W. Hutton, 'Robert Bowyer and the Historic Gallery: A Study of the Creation of a Magnificent Work to Promote the Arts in England', Ph.D. thesis (Chicago ...
Page 7
... late eighteenth-century London. Yet the claim that readers should become spectators reactivated an Aristotelian commonplace which measures rhetorical power by its capacity to set a scene or a story before the eyes of the perceiver.18 In ...
... late eighteenth-century London. Yet the claim that readers should become spectators reactivated an Aristotelian commonplace which measures rhetorical power by its capacity to set a scene or a story before the eyes of the perceiver.18 In ...
Page 8
... late eighteenth-century English painting. My work builds on pioneering art-historical research on Fuseli by Gert Schiff and David Weinglass,22 yet I believe that the Milton Gallery 22 G. Schiff,Johann Heinrich F ̈usslis Milton-Galerie ...
... late eighteenth-century English painting. My work builds on pioneering art-historical research on Fuseli by Gert Schiff and David Weinglass,22 yet I believe that the Milton Gallery 22 G. Schiff,Johann Heinrich F ̈usslis Milton-Galerie ...
Contents
1 | |
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 |
Conclusion | 215 |
List of Pictures in the Milton Gallery The Times 28 May 1799 | 221 |
Bibliography | 225 |
Index | 249 |
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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 active Adam and Eve aesthetic allegory angels argued Artists beauty become body Boydell Boydell’s British called Cambridge canvas catalogue Chapter claim Coleridge collection compared continuous contrast Criticism culture Death defined edition effect eighteenth-century English engraved entries Essays exhibition experience female field figure Fuseli Fuseli’s hand Henry Fuseli History human idea identify illustrated images imagination Italy John Johnson Joseph late Lessing lines literary galleries literature London Macklin’s matter means Milton Gallery mind montage movement moving narrative nature offered opened Oxford painters painting Paradise Lost plot poem poetry Poets political position practices present prints produced published readers reading represented Reynolds Royal Academy Satan scene sense sequence Shakespeare Shakspeare Gallery shape space spectators story sublime suggests takes turn University Press viewers viewing vision visual vols Wollstonecraft writing