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The Shock of the Real

Romanticism and Visual Culture,1760-1860

  • Book
  • © 2001

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Authors:
  1. Gillen D’Arcy Wood
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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
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  2. Introduction

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 1-15

  3. Theater and Painting

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 17-66

  4. Prints and Exhibitions

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 67-97

  5. The Panorama

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 99-120

  6. Ruins and Museums

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 121-169

  7. Illustration Tourism Photography

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 171-218

  8. Afterword

    • Gillen D’Arcy Wood
    Pages 219-223

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 225-273
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

'As well-written and thoughtful as it is broad in scope, the book should be required reading...' - Bradford Mudge, The Wordsworth Circle

About the author

GILLEN D'ARCY WOOD is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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