Description
This book explores the relationship between visual culture and literature during the Romantic period. It examines how new visual media influenced the literary and historical imagination, and how fragments and ruins blurred the line between the visible and invisible. The book also looks at various instances, such as Daguerre's Diorama and Coleridge's play Remorse, where the act of seeing is represented or dramatized. It argues that the popular culture of Regency Britain was not only interested in mass entertainment, but also in the aesthetic and conceptual aspects of looking. The book challenges the idea that Romanticism rejected the visible, and instead suggests that there was a fascination with the visual and its potential for imagination and spectacle.
This book investigates the productive crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the Romantic period, focusing on the construction and manipulation of the visual, the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible. It examines a broad selection of instances that reflect debates over how seeing should itself be viewed: instances, from Daguerre's Diorama, to the staging of Coleridge's play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley's poetry and at the Phantasmagoria, in which the very act of seeing is represented or dramatized. In reconsidering literary engagements with the expanding visual field, this study argues that the popular culture of Regency Britain reflected not just emergent and highly capitalized forms of mass entertainment, but also a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. What is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible gives way to a generative fascination with the visual and its imaginative--even spectacular--possibilities.
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