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 11
... imagination, the late eighteenth-century exhibition scene testifies to the embodied practices of spectators. In fact, the practices I am reconstructing resist the regulating discourse which fashions the man of taste as a detached and ...
... imagination, the late eighteenth-century exhibition scene testifies to the embodied practices of spectators. In fact, the practices I am reconstructing resist the regulating discourse which fashions the man of taste as a detached and ...
Page 12
... imagination at play and its pleasure without concepts have often been used to configure the aesthetic as an autonomous and individual sphere, the work of sublimation distinguishing the imagination from the unpredictable domain of the ...
... imagination at play and its pleasure without concepts have often been used to configure the aesthetic as an autonomous and individual sphere, the work of sublimation distinguishing the imagination from the unpredictable domain of the ...
Page 15
... Imagining the King's Death. For unlike Blake's more clearly spelt-out regicide premonitions, it depends on the eye of the beholder whether Fuseli's figures visualize the regicide haunting Milton's text or not. It is this ambiguity that ...
... Imagining the King's Death. For unlike Blake's more clearly spelt-out regicide premonitions, it depends on the eye of the beholder whether Fuseli's figures visualize the regicide haunting Milton's text or not. It is this ambiguity that ...
Page 16
... imagination, British responses indicated in Shakespeare and Milton the counterproof and promise of British genius.3 Considered as a storehouse of subjects for painters, British poets offered a secular alternative to. 1 St. James's ...
... imagination, British responses indicated in Shakespeare and Milton the counterproof and promise of British genius.3 Considered as a storehouse of subjects for painters, British poets offered a secular alternative to. 1 St. James's ...
Page 36
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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 |
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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