The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (ROMANTIC, PHOTOGRAPHY, ART HISTORY OF LITERATURE)

Gordonsville, Virginia, U.S.A.: Palgrave Macmillan. New. 2001. Hardcover. 0312226543 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** – – *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - FLAWLESS COPY, PRISTINE, NEVER OPENED -- 288 pages; clean and crisp, tight and bright pages, with no writing or markings to the text. -- TABLE OF CONTENTS: Illustrations * Acknowledgments * Introduction: Belzoni's Tomb * Ch. 1 Theater and Painting * Ch. 2 Prints and Exhibitions * Ch. 3 The Panorama * Ch. 4 Ruins and Museums * Ch. 5 Illustration Tourism Photography * Afterword: Visual Culture 2000 * Notes * Bibliography * Index 269. -- DESCRIPTION: 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. -- with a bonus offer-- .