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 4
... space for the production of moving images. Eisenstein helps us read Milton visually and provides a counterbalance to the anti-visual construction of Milton in an anti-pictorialist canon which Harold Bloom articulated in a paradoxical ...
... space for the production of moving images. Eisenstein helps us read Milton visually and provides a counterbalance to the anti-visual construction of Milton in an anti-pictorialist canon which Harold Bloom articulated in a paradoxical ...
Page 8
... space. In the new, purpose-built exhibition space at Somerset House (1780–1836), the Royal Academy ordered its annual exhibitions by hanging the pictures above and below the 'line of sight' and numbering them from left to right, which ...
... space. In the new, purpose-built exhibition space at Somerset House (1780–1836), the Royal Academy ordered its annual exhibitions by hanging the pictures above and below the 'line of sight' and numbering them from left to right, which ...
Page 9
... space, which can represent actions by placing bodies one beside the other.23 Yet boundaries are no sooner set than trespassed. Lessing's definition identifies the medium by the boundaries of the individual painting, but it also captures ...
... space, which can represent actions by placing bodies one beside the other.23 Yet boundaries are no sooner set than trespassed. Lessing's definition identifies the medium by the boundaries of the individual painting, but it also captures ...
Page 14
... space opens up the potential for a literary gallery. How these bodies could move from one picture to the next depended on the senses of energized spectators. Associationist experiments on the persistence of vision showed that subsequent ...
... space opens up the potential for a literary gallery. How these bodies could move from one picture to the next depended on the senses of energized spectators. Associationist experiments on the persistence of vision showed that subsequent ...
Page 21
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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 |
Other editions - View all
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