The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860
Abstract
Already in the century before photography's emergence as a mass medium, a diverse popular visual culture had risen to challenge the British literary establishment. The bourgeois fashion for new visual media - from prints and illustrated books to theatrical spectacles and panoramas - rejected high. Romantic concepts of original genius and the sublime in favor of mass-produced images and the thrill of realistic effects. In response, the literary elite declared the new visual media an offense to Romantic idealism. 'Simulations of nature,' Coleridge declared, are 'loathsome' and 'disgusting.' The Shock of the Real offers a tour of Romantic visual culture, from the West End stage to the tourist-filled Scottish Highlands, from the panoramas of Leicester Square to the photography studios of Second Empire Paris. But in presenting the relation between word and image in the late Georgian age as a form of culture war, the author also proposes an alternative account of Romantic aesthetic ideology - as a reaction not against the rationalism of the Enlightenment but against the visual media age being born.
While the critical establishment baulked at the rapid expansion of the literary marketplace in the early nineteenth century, Lady Morgan’s Florence Macarthy boldly declared its allegiance to the precariously feminised domain of popular romance. Embracing its own synthetic and syncretic modernity, Morgan’s seventh novel revels in the spectacle, sensation and simulation so vociferously denounced by reviewers of her earlier works. Moreover, in its self-reflexive scrutiny of the material processes of Romantic literary production, Morgan’s fiction interrogates its own position within an increasingly commercialised and mechanised publishing industry. In asserting the centrality of such commercial and mechanical modernity to Morgan’s aesthetic, this article departs from previous scholarly discussions of her oeuvre. It argues that Florence Macarthy’s engagement with Irish politics is not anchored in antiquarian retrospection but instead emerges out of an effervescent literary marketplace in direct competition with new arenas of spectacular entertainment. Thus, rather than promote a supposedly atavistic and anachronistic cultural nationalism, the surface narrative’s flirtation with the romance of Irish antiquity is continually disrupted by an underlying acknowledgement of the competing literary, political and historical narratives at play within the national tale. Synchronising and synthesising these competing discourses for the popular reader, Florence Macarthy registers the hybridity of its own romance as a distinctly modern yet sophisticated form of mechanical reproduction that cannot be dismissed as the mere automatism of an antiquarian reflex.
This paper deals with representations of Bosnia and Herzegovina
in the publication Kriegs-Bilder-Skizzen aus dem Bosnisch-Herzegowinischen
Occupations-Feldzugе 1878, analyzing illustrations based on photographs captured
during the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian
Empire in 1878. The paper analyzes the arrangement of the illustrations in the
publication and their depictions of the Bosnian landscape aimed at a contemporary
Austro-Hungarian audience. By extension, the paper explores representational
issues surrounding the Bosnian crisis, namely the Austro-Hungarian gaze on the
Bosnian territory, culture, and population, and its influence on the political and
social reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This special issue foregrounds new scholarship on Romanticism and vision. From its origins as a keyword for the visionary imagination, “vision” has in recent decades become an important lens for thinking about the embodied sense of sight and the aims and objectives of looking. The essays collected here contribute to the current work of reassessing Romantic approaches to and concerns over vision by exploring the tension between word and image, shifting paradigms in the theatrical and visual arts, and the social and political stakes of viewing, from the formation of the gaze, to sympathetic viewership, to the construction of bodily and racial difference.
This article examines artworks by Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Thomas Banks in relation to changing notions of “self evidence” at the turn of the nineteenth century. It considers how models of artistic neoclassicism and scientific experimental procedures shared an investment in the evidentiary authority of an idealized male body. Exploring the gendered and racial hierarchies operative in such an ideal, this article also charts its unraveling.
In this essay I consider the counter-intuitive (even apparently impossible) enterprise of picturing ekphrasis—of visually depicting the verbal representation of the visual. I do so by attending to two paintings, by William Martin and James Barry, of the disturbing scene in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in which Iachimo gains illicit entry to Imogen’s bedroom and proceeds to record details of both the room and her body, details he later uses to convince Posthumus, Imogen’s exiled husband, of her infidelity. I argue that Martin’s and Barry’s attempts to paint this event of ekphrasis—of ekphrasis as violation—respond to and need to be understood within the specific institutional and aesthetic contexts of vexed intermediality in late-eighteenth century London, in particular the ascendancy of spectacular dramaturgy, the arrival of the literary gallery, and entrenched notions of painting’s textuality. Martin and Barry, I suggest, show ekphrasis in order to interrogate and eschew both its rhetorical imperative (image as word) and its iconophobic implication (image as less than word). In picturing ekphrasis, their paintings trouble the conception of the painting as a would-be poem and resist the textual and textualizing gaze that demands that they submit to the procedures of reading.
It's about Keats, Rilke and Rodin.
American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the “Gilded Age”. She does not seem to be a very obvious candidate for the type of academic scrutiny synonymous with “ecocriticism”. On university syllabi Wharton often features as a novelist of manners par excellence, whose fiction documents in coruscating detail the cossetted inhabitants of well-appointed libraries and drawing-rooms. My project seeks to push against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other “species of spaces” in Wharton’s work. For example, how do Wharton’s narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton’s craft? My Introduction proposes that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate “follies”. Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there.
My first chapter – “The Pastoral Cosmopolitanism of the (not so) Secret Garden” – shows how some of Wharton’s moneyed, boundary-crossing characters yearn for a return to the native, the sheltered nook or the pastoral retreat. In so doing, Wharton invites us to reappraise “cosmopolitanism” as an analytic category. In her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, Wharton refers to her own literary production as her “secret garden”. What my chapter demonstrates is that the private park or the public garden becomes a site for staging (and engaging with) tensions between the cosmopolitan and the pastoral, the exotic and the endemic, elite and mass culture, the globe-trotting and the parochial.
The second chapter is entitled “‘Endless Plays of Mountain Forms’: Mapping the Mountains”. In a letter to Nicky Mariano on 31st May 1932, Wharton described the Sibylline Mountains thus: “The run today was indescribably beautiful, with changing skies & such endless plays of mountain forms”. Her response to the shape-shifting plasticity of this terrain is suggestive of the ways in which rocky peaks and summits operate in Wharton’s fiction more broadly. Her writing enterprise, I argue, evinces an abiding and acute fascination with the metaphorical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of mountains. By construing key Wharton texts through an ecocritical lens, I propose that her fictional summits and hills can be understood as “edgelands at an altitude”.
The third and final chapter – “Romantic Ruins? Edith Wharton’s Sedimented Vision” – addresses Wharton’s representation of the “ruin” as a space between the natural and the man-made. That monumental ruins and garden “follies” carry such affective and symbolic resonance in her oeuvre is owing partly to her incisive treatment of John Ruskin’s cultural theories, especially his powerful conception of the “voicefulness” of crumbling masonry, where the living and the dead seem to be in complex and eerie dialogue. Overall, then, Wharton’s oeuvre can be construed as a form of “imaginative archeology”, in which she excavates personal experience with a view to restructuring it in her fictions.
How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.
Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.
This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.
The paper explores Chinatown as an ephemeral site of visual indeterminacy in the 1870s by looking at a number of Californian Chinatown accounts in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” (1878) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). Late-nineteenth-century Chinatown as an exhibitory locus of authentic Chinese-ness for Western tourists is paradoxically characterized by its mutability rather than realism. By examining the accounts of Jackson and Twain about the Chinese in the 1870s, the decade before the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the paper rethinks the “virtual” existence of Chinatown, its contested nature as a “phantasmatic site” for western projections and visual consumption, which manifests the potential realization of national transformation in the mythic Orient of the new West.
Science fiction was being written throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it underwent a rapid expansion of cultural dissemination and popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This Element explores the ways this explosion in interest in 'scientific romance', that informs today's global science fiction culture, manifests the specific historical exigences of the revolutions in publishing and distribution technology. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and other science fiction writers embody in their art the advances in material culture that mobilize, reproduce and distribute with new rapidity, determining the cultural logic of twentieth-century science fiction in the process.
Alexandra Paterson’s chapter takes a key phrase from Hyperion, ‘natural sculpture’, as a basis from which to explore the connections among geology, sculpture and human bodies in Keats’s poetry. Her argument is that Keats’s poetic depictions of sculptures and Hyperion’s fallen Titans are more profoundly influenced by the poet’s geological observations in various places, including the British Museum and geological sites visited during the northern walking tour, than has been hitherto acknowledged. Paterson brings material aspects of these sites—marble and rock—into animating contact with Keats’s Hyperion fragments.
Dickens's comic account of a charity dinner for the “Indigent Orphans’ Friends Benevolent Institution” in his sketch “Public Dinners” ( Sketches by ‘Boz’ ) is illustrated in the 1838 serial and 1839 volume editions with the image in Figure 2.
John Keats (1795–1821) continues to delight and challenge readers both within and beyond the academic community through his poems and letters. This volume provides frameworks for enhanced analysis and appreciation of Keats and his work, with each chapter supplying a succinct, informed, and accessible account of a particular topic. Leading scholars examine the life and work of Keats against the backdrop of his influences, contemporaries, and reception, and explore the interaction of poet and world. The essays consider his enduring but ever-altering appeal, engage with critical discussion and debate, and offer revisionary close reading of the poems and letters. Students and specialists will find their knowledge of Keats's life and work enriched by chapters that survey subjects ranging from education, relationships, and religion to art, genre, and film.
This article focuses on how Balzacian interiors and their dwellers signal a new experience and understanding of the past and the present that emerged during the Revolution and its aftermath. In this context, two interiors are analyzed: the interior of the Hôtel d’Esgrignon in Le Cabinet des Antiques and the antique shop passage in La Peau de chagrin. Both literary interiors in different ways embody traces of an “absent present” and constitute a solipsist mimesis of reciprocity between dweller and dwelling. These literary interiors signal fundamental aspects of a century that was marked by the loss of the past to history and by the experience of present time as but an elusive, fragile trace. Like the two sides of the same coin, this was also the time of vivification of absent images that are simulated, imitated in interiors of presentification, like the stereographic cabinet or the panoramic theatre. These interiors radicalize the traditional cabinet and its imagery, like Walter Benjamin’s typification of the window shop and the panoramic theatre would show. The Hôtel d’Esgrignon substantiates an absence-less presence with reality. Balzac conceives the mimetic relationship between the cénacle des antiques and its Hôtel as a sophisticated subtext that reveals the illusionary nature of the ambition to establish such an absolute present. Those who reside in the Hôtel constitute the object-like and lifeless parody of a dynamics of representation played out and that reveals the fundamental absence they stand for. In La Peau de chagrin, isolated objects are fragmented, eclectic bits and pieces of representations that are vivified, and not imitated, by imagination. The cabinet as a place that is the objects it arranges and shows, is internalized as a mental space of imagination, of hyperbolic possibilities of representational assemblage. The hybridity of its visitor is that of imagination itself being represented. Here, Balzac points forward to a literary development in which spatial settings, par excellence that of a vast, fantastic, endless space, will become an image of (literary) representation itself. This paper is published as part of a collection on interiorities.
The aim of this paper is to attract the reader’s attention on the treatment of the sounds of nature by British poets in the pre-Romantic and Romantic era. It is demonstrated that, at a time when the age-old topos of world harmony was at bay in an increasingly dechristianized Europe, poets endeavoured to revive the idea of a pact of man with nature through the notion of aural sensation. From Thomson to Keats, natural noises and sounds came to the status of traces of the transcendence. In texts such as The Task (Cowper) or “On the Power of Sound” (Wordsworth), the topos of locus amoenus and that of harmony are outlined so as to point to an evanescent unity at work in nature which it is the poet’s task to find and to bring to the knowledge of his fellow human beings. It is striking that, in forgotten fragments and major works alike, the lexical field of music as an art is omnipresent, though unobtrusive, in bucolic or georgic depictions of landscapes. Used in metaphors, it hints at natural sounds to be heard and understood as a language that man must be aware of and make his. Poetry around 1720-1830 thus invited each of its readers, as an individual, to open themselves to the mystery underlying the sensible world and to re-enchant their vision of this world… through listening.
Genevan author, teacher, and artist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) completed Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois, a picture story that many consider to be the first comic strip or graphic novel, in 1827.1 From that time until his death, he sketched pictorial narratives that he called ‘histoires en estampes’ or stories in prints, completing seven long albums as well as unpublished fragments. While he was experimenting with comics, Töpffer was composing a large corpus of published prose: travel writing and essays exploring aesthetic theory and describing the genre he invented, much of it influenced by picturesque treks in the Alps that he led for his students, the mixed text-and-image travelogues Voyages en Zigzag in which he recorded those trips, and the mixed-media art and literature prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, I will argue that he drew his primary inspiration for his first two comic strips from William Gilpin’s picturesque landscape viewing and drawing techniques and that with his early comics he entered into a joust, so to speak, with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton, who made the aesthetics of high-tech theatrical narrative art popular in their dioramas.2
When Dorothy Wordsworth arrived in Switzerland in 1820 with her brother the poet William Wordsworth, his wife Mary Wordsworth, her cousin Thomas Monkhouse, and his new wife Jane Horrocks, they were one of many middle-class family groups who adopted the practices of commercial tourism in order to see the country. Her Journal of a Tour on the Continent, which covers the three-and-a-half-month journey through France, Switzerland, and Italy, records her visits to renowned sites such as the birthplace of William Tell, the castle of Chillon, Voltaire’s château, and her brother’s path through the Alps from his walking tour of 1790. With the reopening of the Continent after the end of the Napoleonic wars, travel abroad was no longer only a privilege of wealthy men on the Grand Tour but a popular consumer enterprise supported and enhanced by guidebooks, print culture, and visual entertainments (Wood 117). Many of these were influenced by William Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque, namely an aesthetic based on the perceptual structures of art that encouraged tourists to view landscape as a picture. On her tour, Wordsworth relied on guidebooks such as William Coxe’s 1789 Travels in Switzerland and Johann Gottfried Ebel’s The Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland of 1820, as well as Robert Barker’s Alpine panoramas, prints of major sites, and her brother’s poetic depictions of his former tour in Descriptive Sketches and The Prelude.1
To teach Romantic period literature and visual culture together is to approach the subject in a way that responds to the broader cultural preoccupations proper to that literature. It is of course only one possible interdisciplinary approach, and a strong case could made for readings of Romantic texts that are attentive to history, politics, the natural sciences, sexuality and so on. I will argue below that the relationship of Romantic literature to questions of visuality is a close and productive one, but I would like to begin by addressing the more general problem of disciplines and their boundaries — or, to put it differently, how one thinks of interdisciplinarity and its potential gains. Interdisciplinarity has been as often contested for offering conceptual support to intellectual alliances that are more convenient than necessary, as praised for enabling more subtle and complete understanding. However, interdisci-plinarity responds to the inherent limitations of disciplines not simply by making connections and fostering dialogue between them, or by allowing more (or more probing) questions to be asked than a given discipline may allow on its own, but by opening up a potentially “undisciplined” space in the areas in between.1 To some extent, this space is what Roland Barthes refers to when he argues that interdisciplinary study is not about confronting “already constituted disciplines”; rather, “Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one” (Barthes 1986: 72).
This dissertation investigates a series of large–scale apocalyptic-themed paintings produced in London during the 1820s by the artists John Martin, Francis Danby and David Roberts. Each of these artists created works that excited and amazed London audiences with their scale, perspective, and visual drama. However, they were not mere spectacles. My central contention is that many people viewed these paintings through a political framework in the 1820s and 1830s, and that the meanings generated by them were aligned with the rhetoric and policies of those in favor of political reform. Rather than interpreting these paintings as bleak predictions of a violent future, I believe they should be viewed as mechanisms of political motivation. Painting the destruction of ancient cities was designed to motivate viewers to want to avoid such destruction in the future. During this era Britain was commonly described as either modern Babylon or modern Israel and these works suggested that the collective salvation of Britain was contingent on political reform. The frequent employment of biblical narratives in political writings and their repeated use by several artists during a concentrated period of time provides a firm basis for positing connections between the visual and the political. In support of my argument I have analyzed the coherence between the discursive implications of these religious subjects in concert with the manner of their representation. Through the examination of an array of primary sources, including popular journals, published sermons, religious pamphlets, art criticism, and newspaper articles, I demonstrate how these paintings could have connoted reformist political policies such the abolition of slavery, land redistribution, and other measures designed to foster economic equality and counter laissez faire ideology. In short, my work attempts to shed light on the connections between Christianity and progressive political ideas in the early nineteenth century and illuminate the ways in which visual media impacted these dynamic processes.
Wordsworth and the PanoramaSpectacular Developments: The Diorama and the PhantasmagoriaExhibitions, Museums, and GalleriesIllustration and EkphrasisReferences and Further Reading
At the London Museum of Manufactures founded in 1852, Henry Cole, Owen Jones and Richard Redgrave used their own writings and those of Augustus Welby Pugin to promote “conventionalised” ornament, prohibiting figurative representation in design objects. This essay advances a new interpretation of design reform by reading the “conventionalised” ornament rule as part of a broader engagement of design with its own mediatised conditions – a recognition signified by the term “surface.” After locating the origins of this concept in the early 1840s, the paper traces a decade-long polemic on the relations of images and surfaces. As new regimes of mediation, reproduction and circulation developed, they threatened – according to the design reformers – to make decorated design less like an artefact and more like an image. While theory was used to discipline the boundaries between images and artefacts and to fix the borders between the disciplines and labour of fine art, print culture, architecture and design, design practice explored ambiguous architectural surfaces: foregoing medium specificity to oscillate between media.
From its outset, the US anti-slavery movement embraced new visual technologies and modes of visual display to bring slavery into focus. Pictorial representations of slavery were central to the campaign. In the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) circulated some 40,000 depictions of slavery a year, ranging from woodcuts and broadsides to engravings and portraits (J. Wilson 354). This extensive iconographical system was deployed and recycled throughout the antebellum period. Emerging simultaneously with the rise of mass visual culture in the United States, the anti-slavery movement took full advantage of its society’s interest in the image and belief in the visual’s unique ability to persuade. As The Emancipator argues, “Abolitionists know the influence of visual impressions. . . . In consequence, they will make appeals through the eye to the heart and understanding.” According to The Emancipator, pictures were able to “excite the mind,” “awaken and fix attention,” and arouse feeling. The image’s immediacy, along with its perceptual capacities and emotive power, successfully turns its viewer into an “eye-witness” to slavery’s cruelties as well as a “partaker” of the slave’s woes (“Pictorials” Feb. 1836). The visual simultaneously produces a sense of the real—a “correct and vivid impression of living reality” as The Emancipator puts it (“Pictorials” 5 May 1836)—and arouses sympathy for the slave, since the eye is an “avenue to the heart and the conscience of the community,” as the Executive Committee of the AASS states (Wright). A central component of the anti-slavery appeal, the image provided both graphical accuracy and emotional effectiveness.
By utilizing the visual, the anti-slavery movement participated in the perceptual revolution under way in US culture. As Jonathan Crary and others have argued, vision was profoundly reconfigured in the nineteenth century, producing new types of observers, viewing practices, and forms of visual consumption (2-3). While the anti-slavery movement utilized a complex array of visual modes to make its appeal, this essay asserts the centrality of the panorama and its attendant bird’s-eye view to the anti-slavery argument. The panorama—along with its omniscient viewpoint—was a central visual mode in the nineteenth century. Responding to an emerging mass marketplace, urbanization, industrialization, and imperial expansion, the panorama’s perceptual mode enabled the eye to organize an ever-expanding array of goods and geographies. Through its ability to encompass this proliferating whole, the panoramic perspective, as evident not only in the vogue for panoramas themselves but also in the popularity of prospect painting, city views, and ballooning during the period, became dominant. As a specifically bourgeois mode of seeing, the panoramic perspective provided emerging middle-class viewers a commanding point of view from which to assert their power and mastery over an increasingly complex social and natural landscape.
In adopting the panorama as its dominant visual mode, the anti-slavery movement, I argue, not only established its perceptual power over the spectacle of slavery but also made its message powerfully appealing to a Northern white middle-class audience. Anti-slavery’s visual culture provided its audience access to knowledge about slavery as well as the perspective of a privileged class position. Through a distanced, yet seemingly all-encompassing point of view, antislavery observers were encouraged to learn about and sympathize with the slave even as they took visual possession of him. As an operation of social power, the panoramic perspective provided the white Northern viewer access to a position of specular dominance over the landscape of slavery as well as the body of the slave. Again and again, anti-slavery’s iconography embeds the slave’s body within the imprisoning landscape of slavery while drawing its viewers’ eyes to aerial positions of power. Through the scopic subjugation of the slave, white anti-slavery viewers gained access to their own mastery. Anti-slavery visual culture, then, reveals how fully the visual consolidation of class in the nineteenth century depended upon race.
By locating the panoramic perspective in a wide array of pictorial examples produced by the anti-slavery movement from the 1820s to the 1850s—broadsides, woodcuts in newspapers and almanacs, and engravings in slave narratives—I show how the anti-slavery movement...
This essay identifies three differing ways of seeing in Thomas Jefferson's writing about land and travel, and associates them with three distinct Jefferersonian personae – “son of science”, “sentimental traveller” and “Romantic”. Jefferson wrote as a scientist for men and as “sentimental traveller” primarily in letters to women. His deployment of the Romantic sublime occurs in both contexts, where his motive is to persuade his reader(s) of the superiority of the New World to the Old. This is in keeping with the fact that Jefferson's vision, especially (given that he was a plantation owner and surveyor) of land and lands, was always proprietorial and, in some sense, political. The essay concludes with the observation that much of Jefferson's genius as political leader lay in his ability as a see-er to visualise a geoimaginative space for his new nation and thereby stake a claim for it, literally and figuratively, vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
On 17 November 1764, Sir William Hamilton arrived in Naples bearing the title His British Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Upon arrival, he leased a spacious villa that would serve as a home, a salon for the polite gatherings he and his wife Catherine hosted, and as a display space for his collections. His presence in Naples and the securing of a second villa located roughly between the excavation sites of the ancient cities Pompeii and Herculaneum soon afforded Hamilton the opportunity to acquire an extensive collection of ancient artifacts including medallions, coins, jewelry, bronze sculptures, and, most highly praised, a great number of ancient painted pottery vases. Over the course of Hamilton's life he consistently seems to have had a compulsion to report his findings, to make his observations and thoughts useful to others. He diligently reported his discoveries regarding Mount Vesuvius to the Royal Society and was equally responsible in his reports to the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Dilettanti regarding the excavations he witnessed and the collections he assembled. Perhaps spurred on by what he saw as a capricious use of print by the Bourbon family of Naples, Hamilton embarked on his own publishing project. While the royal family, which tightly guarded access to the ruins, also limited the circulation of Le Antichità di Ercolano to gift volumes bestowed on important visiting dignitaries and aristocrats, Hamilton envisioned a far different circulation pattern for his own publication. Two years after his arrival in Naples, he wrote to one of the underage king's regents that "his Sicilian Majesty would do more to service the arts by allowing the books of Herculaneum to be sold than by giving the few copies in the manner they were given," and he goes on to speculate that the sale of the books might be used to finance continuing excavations. Unmistakably, Hamilton played a key role in both collecting and publishing, and it is their distinction and interrelation that helped separate the fine arts from antiquarianism. It is widely agreed upon that Hamilton's collection greatly influenced eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century neoclassical art and design. Indeed, the pots, many of which are housed in the British Museum, continue to interest classical scholars and historians of design, yet scholarship often addresses "the collection" ambiguously. Is it the physical collection itself that so influenced the aesthetics of the period, or depictions of the collection? My aim is to distinguish between two kinds of collections—the physical, or "real," collection of pottery artifacts versus engravings bound into books—to argue that it was the idea of the collection as represented in print, and not the collection of things, that was so important to the English imagination in the Romantic period.
Hamilton made two "real" collections over the course of the last four decades of the eighteenth century. His vases became famous not necessarily in their own right, but because he produced books that disseminated their idealized images to a wide British and continental audience. These books are evidence of the irreconcilable problem of neoclassicism in the Romantic period, because each plate embodies the tension between the principles of classical beauty and very old things, which rarely turn up in an ideal state. Furthermore, significant changes in the way vases were engraved over a span of thirty or forty years demonstrate how a supposedly immutable collection of objects is subject to radical shifts in representation, partially in response to the social and political climate. While the figures on the Grecian urn might be frozen mid movement, this "foster-child of silence," which since Keats's poem has suggested a certain kind of fixed aesthetic truth, hardly existed in anything like "slow time." In fact, the engravings discussed below demonstrate that the Grecian urn was redefined in relatively quick succession by competing aesthetic positions. These ancient objects, in other words, symbolized some of the dominant struggles within the emerging...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Requires PDF file reader.
PréambuleLes modalités des spectacles et les dispositifs optiques en vogue au XIXè siècle ont souvent fourni aux écrivains de l’époque des modèles de scénographie mentale dont ils se sont inspirés et autorisés pour présenter ou représenter les aspects mentaux, psychologiques et moraux de la vie de leurs personnages. On en trouve de nombreux exemples chez Dickens ou George Eliot en Angleterre, et pour s’en tenir à des noms connus, chez Balzac en France mais aussi, comme on s’en aperçoit à la l...
By the end of the eighteenth century, the arts had been surveyed by an unprecedented series of major works on literature, music, and painting of which the author or this book provides a rich and comprehensive analysis