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In Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (2008), she writes that “ngagement with the visible, even in its absence, is everywhere in Romanticism, and not only as a kind of negative index or symptom” (4). If Galperin and Wood conceive of Romanticism as encompassing a visual culture that, though repressed and suppressed by a dominant literary culture, was alive and well, Sophie Thomas understands the relation between visual and imaginative endeavors somewhat less confrontationally. His book, a recovery effort lightly reminiscent of Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (1978), reveals the significance of the period’s theater, painting, prints, exhibitions, panoramas, ruins, museums, and illustrations.
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Wood reimagines Romanticism less as a formal category-a literary movement marked by the ascendency of the lyric and the putative turn away from the bodily eye toward the eye of the mind-than as a scene of aesthetic contestation, a “culture war” fought between text and image, wherein the establishment of a literary artistic hierarchy cast a shadow over popular forms of visual culture largely with the aim of obscuring it from view (13–14). The idea that visual culture can somehow be separated from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century creative production is also challenged by Gillen D’Arcy Wood in The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760– 1860 (2001), which foregrounds the turn toward spectacle in an age long characterized by anti-pictorial sentiment. For Galperin, the visible is not absent from Romantic literature it is “foundational” (4). Because this world, in all its sheer facticity, is “unassimilable to control or conceptualization,” it returns in the form of the repressed, haunting and destabilizing efforts to formulate “a single, unitary ideal” (3–4).
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Seemingly disembodied and purely mental forms of vision, Galperin contends, depend upon an “imaginative appropriation” of the physical world. Galperin’s pathbreaking The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (1993)-authored in the wake of Martin Meisel’s Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983)-was one of the first studies to posit a connection rather than a divorce between vision and the visionary: namely, that the visible world is not left behind in the period’s literature but is, rather, “the central and unrivalled repressed of romanticism” (3). Mitchell, Jonathan Crary, and Nicholas Mirzoeff defining and redefining visuality-the discursive, culturally constituted aspects of visual experience that structure acts of looking.īecause the aesthetic ideology of high Romanticism held sway for so long, it was not until the late twentieth-century that Romantic scholars began engaging with vision as a sense-based mode of seeing, beyond the mental and spiritual insight articulated by an idealized lyric subject. Scholarship on the visual in its material, cultural, and political senses has been long in the making, with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, John Berger, Lisa Cartwright, Laura Mulvey, Stuart Hall, W. From its earlier alignment with the visionary imagination, it has expanded to include analyses of embodied perception of the science of optics and technologies of seeing of visual art and culture and of the ideological work of vision, from the panoptic gaze to perceptions of social and physical difference. While each of these landmark texts makes “vision” a central concept, the implications of the term as a keyword for Romanticism have changed dramatically in recent decades. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), and sixty years since Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company (1961). It has now been roughly seventy years since the publication of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947) and M. “Vision” is a loaded word in Romantic studies.