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 visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible.

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.

Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations



(Introduction) Regarding Visuality: From the
Picturesque to the Panorama


'Shadows of a Magnitude':
Keats, Fragments, and Vision

The Fragment in Ruins


Seeing Past Rome: Ruins, History, Museums


Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight


Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double,
and the Gothic Subject


Seeing Things ("as they are"): Coleridge, Schiller,
and the Play of Semblance


Vision and Revulsion: Shelley, Medusa, and
the Phantasmagoria

Notes
Bibliography
Index