You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
By examining the motif of ruination in a variety of late-eighteenth-century domains, this book portrays the moral aesthetic of the culture of sensibility in Europe, particularly its negotiation of the demands of tradition and pragmatism alongside utopian longings for authenticity, natural goodness, self-governance, mutual transparency, and instantaneous kinship. This book argues that the rhetoric of ruins lends a distinctive shape to the architecture and literature of the time and requires the novel to adjust notions of authorship and narrative to accommodate the prevailing aesthetic. Just as architects of eighteenth-century follies pretend to have discovered "authentic" ruins, novelists within the culture of sensibility also build purposely fragmented texts and disguise their authorship, invoking highly artificial means of simulating nature. The cultural pursuit of human ruin, however, leads to hypocritical and sadistic extremes that put an end to the characteristic ambivalence of sensibility and its unusual structures.
Learning-through-Touring uncovers ways in which people interact with the built environment by exploring the spaces around, between and within buildings. The key idea embodied in the book is that learning through touring is haptic –the learner is a physical, cognitive and emotional participant in the process. It also develops the concept that tours, rather than being finished products, are designed to evolve through user participation and over time. Part One of the book presents a series of analytical investigations into theories and practices of learning and touring that have then been developed to produce a set of conceptual methods for tour design. Projects that have tried and tested the...
Studying works by William Blake, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen, this volume examines the extent to which Romantic literary works can be said to prefigure the ways in which readers will engage with them after the time of their creation.
As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.
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.
As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.
Henry James stands as one of the preeminent writers of the late 19th/early 20th century period; however, the world he wrote about has since disappeared. This collection of essays provides pedagogical assistance for several of his short stories--including "The Jolly Corner", "The Europeans" and "Travelling Companions"--and his most anthologized longer works. It is aimed at instructors who do not consider themselves experts on James' work. Each essay approaches a single work, offering a critical analysis as well as providing pedagogical suggestions for how to introduce both the work and the relevant social issues to students of the 21st century.
Architecture can be analogous to a history, a fiction, and a landscape. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The catalyst to this tradition was the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the eighteenth century of new art forms: the picturesque landscape, the analytical history, and the English novel. Each of them instigated a creative and questioning response to empiricism’s detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world, and together they stimulated a design practice and lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries. Associating the changing natural world with journeys in self-understanding, and the design process with a visual and spatial autobiography, this book describes journeys between London and the North Sea in successive centuries, analysing an enduring and evolving tradition from the picturesque and romanticism to modernism. Creative architects have often looked to the past to understand the present and imagine the future. Twenty-first-century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.
The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful—and for that reason, contested—ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meanin...
Sigal argues that sixteenth century Nahua sexuality cannot be fully understood only through colonial sensibilities and sources. He examines legal documents, clerical texts, pictorial manuscripts, images and glyphs of Nahua gods and goddesses and descriptions of fertility rituals and other historical accounts and stories to show the complexity of Nahua sexuality.