The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement - commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing. It explores how these Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, setting them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators, (including Fuseli, Flaxman, and Reynolds) both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. Pite also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.

This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition devoted to a fascinating group of drawings by the Anglo-Swiss Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), one of eighteenth-century Europe's most idiosyncratic, original and controversial artists. Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Fuseli energetically cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylised images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad. Fuseli's contemporaries might have thought him even crazier had they been aware that in private he harboured an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of the modern woman, which he pursued almost exclusively in his drawings. Where one might have expected idealised bodies with the grace and proportions of classical statues, here instead we encounter figures whose anatomies have been shaped by stiff bodices, waistbands, puff ed sleeves, and pointed shoes, and whose heads are crowned by coiffures of the most bizarre and complicated sort. Often based on the artist's wife Sophia Rawlins, the women who populate Fuseli's graphic work tend to adopt brazenly aggressive attitudes, either fixing their gaze directly on the viewer or ignoring our presence altogether. Usually they appear on their own, in isolation on the page; sometimes they are grouped together to form disturbing narratives, erotic fantasies that may be mysterious, vaguely menacing, or overtly transgressive, but where women always play a dominant role. Among the many intriguing questions raised by these works is the extent to which his wife Sophia was actively involved in fashioning her appearance for her own pleasure, as well as for the benefit of her husband. By bringing together more than fi fty of these studies (roughly a third of the known total), The Courtauld Gallery will give audiences an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the finest Romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalogue will further be invited to consider how Fuseli's drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today. The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and from other European and North American institutions.

Typically regarded as reflecting on a culture in social, political, or psychological crisis, the arts in fin-de-siecle Vienna had another side: they were means by which creative individuals imagined better futures and perfected worlds dawning with the turn of the twentieth century. As author Kevin C. Karnes reveals, much of this utopian discourse drew inspiration from the work of Richard Wagner, whose writings and music stood for both a deluded past and an ideal future yet to come. Illuminating this neglected dimension of Vienna's creative culture, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Uncovering artworks long forgotten and providing new perspectives on some of the most celebrated achievements in the Western canon, Karnes considers music by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Alexander Zemlinsky, paintings, sculptures, and graphic art by Klimt, Max Klinger, and members of the Vienna Secession, and philosophical writings by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Through analyses of artworks and the cultural dynamics that surrounded their creation and reception, this study reveals a powerful current of millennial optimism running counter and parallel to the cultural pessimism widely associated with the period. It discloses a utopian discourse that is at once beautiful, moving, and deeply disturbing, as visions of perfection gave rise to ecstatic artworks and dystopian social and political realities.

This title proposes a fundamental revaluation of the central poet of British Romanticism. By looking at the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these innovations to Wordsworth's sense that he was writing for posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.

A renowned scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and elan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of the immense achievements of romantic writers and artists in all media. Gay's scope is wide, his insights sharp. He takes on the recurring questions about how to interpret romantic figures and their works. Who qualifies to be a romantic? What ties together romantic figures who practice in different countries, employ different media, even live in different centuries? How is modernism indebted to romanticism, if at all? Guiding readers through the history of the romantic movement across Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, Gay argues that the best way to conceptualize romanticism is to accept its complicated nature and acknowledge that there is no "single basket" to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in "families," whose individual members share fundamental values but retain unique qualities. He concludes by demonstrating that romanticism extends well into the twentieth century, where its deep and lasting impact may be measured in the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

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.

The beauty of nature and man's loneliness are dominant themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The artist often places a small human figure in a broad landscape, as in his famous paintings Monk by the Sea and The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. For a long time the importance and influence of this great Romantic painter were underestimated. When he died, Friedrich had already been forgotten by his contemporaries and was only rediscovered in the early 20th century. Today he is considered to be the most important German painter of his generation and a precursor of Expressionism. Once Friedrich gave the following advice to an artist-colleague of his who was constricted by academic rules: "Shut your physical eye so that you first see your painting with your spiritual eye. Then bring to light what you saw in the dark so that it has an effect on others, shining inwards from outside." In other words, concentration and not imitation, essence and not frivolous brushwork. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

John Ruskin first came to widespread attention for his support for the work of J. M. W. Turner and his defence of naturalism in art. Later he was the executor of Turner's will. The present volume collects Ruskin's essay on Turner's paintings of English Harbours and Ruskins commentary on numerous other works of Turner.

Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, "A Rossetti Family Chronology" breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the "Chronolgy" deomstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the" Author Chronologies" series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.

This text is an interdisciplinary study of Romanticism which focuses on the reception of the Biblical canon in poetry, art and theory. The Bible is acknowledged as the heart of European culture, but as its status as the sacred text of Judaism and Christianity becomes questionable, it remains at the turning point between sacred and secular art in the modern world. The insights of Romanticism are crucial for our understanding of postmodernism as a fundamentally religious movement which acknowledges both the death and rebirth of religious language.

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

John Martin's many influential works brought him huge popularity in his lifetime and his paintings have gone on to inspire film-makers, designers and artists in Europe and America. This beautifully illustrated book makes an important contribution to the revival of national and international interest in him and will complement a forthcoming touring exhibition. Establishing the context of Martin's youth in rural Northumberland, his career in London and subsequent national and international fame, Morden captures the apocalyptic mood in England from the 1790s to the 1840s and examines Martin's central position as a painter of the "sublime". The distinctive character of his work is explored through key paintings in terms of his techniques, devices and subject matter and their relationship to the culture and of popular entertainment of the time. Influencing 19th century railway and public architecture, Martin's reputation spread to Europe and America, going on to determine the course of early 20th century cinema and anticipate inter-active mass media in the 21st century. This book establishes John Martin as an important figure in cultural history, shaping the way we view and respond to our modern world.

Waiting for the millennium was a major feature of British society at the endof the 18th century. But how exactly did this preoccupation shape—and how was it shaped by—the literature, art, and politics of the period we now call Romantic? These essays investigate a series of millenarians both famous and forgotten, from Coleridge to Cowper, Blake to Byron; and explore the artistic and political subcultures of radical London; the religious sects surrounding Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, and the poetics of feminism and Orientalism. Romanticism and Millenarianism presents an expanded and rehistoricized canon of writers and artists who shaped key debates about revolution, empire, gender, and sexuality.

Paris, City of Dreams traces the transformation of the City of Light during Napoleon III’s Second Empire into the beloved city of today. Together, Napoleon III and his right-hand man, Georges Haussmann, completely rebuilt Paris in less than two decades—a breathtaking achievement made possible not only by the emperor’s vision and Haussmann’s determination, but by the regime’s unrelenting authoritarianism, augmented by the booming economy that Napoleon fostered. Yet a number of Parisians refused to comply with the restrictions that censorship and entrenched institutional taste imposed. Mary McAuliffe follows the lives of artists such as Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet, as well as writers such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, while from exile, Victor Hugo continued to fire literary broadsides at the emperor he detested. McAuliffe brings to life a pivotal era encompassing not only the physical restructuring of Paris but also the innovative forms of banking and money-lending that financed industrialization as well as the city’s transformation. This in turn created new wealth and flaunted excess, even while producing extreme poverty. Even more deeply, change was occurring in the way people looked at and understood the world around them, given the new ease of transportation and communication, the popularization of photography, and the emergence of what would soon be known as Impressionism in art and Naturalism and Realism in literature—artistic yearnings that would flower in the Belle Epoque. Napoleon III, whose reign abruptly ended after he led France into a devastating war against Germany, has been forgotten. But the Paris that he created has endured, brought to vivid life through McAuliffe’s rich illustrations and evocative narrative.

This book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, explores and celebrates Turner's lifelong fascination with the sea. It also sets his work within the context of marine painting in the 19th century. Each chapter has an introductory text followed by discussion of specific paintings. Four of the chapters conclude with a feature essay on a specific topic.

The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, claimed Caspar David Friedrich, but also what he sees in himself . He should have a dialogue with Nature . Friedrich s words encapsulate two central elements of the Romantic conception of landscape: close observation of the natural world and the importance of the imagination. Exploring aspects of Romantic landscape drawing in Britain and Germany from its origins in the 1760s to its final flowering in the 1840s, this exhibition catalogue considers 26 major drawings, watercolors and oil sketches from The Courtauld Gallery, London, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Lessing. It draws upon the complementary strengths of both collections: the Morgan s exceptional group of German drawings and The Courtauld s wide-ranging holdings of British works. A Dialogue with Nature offers the opportunity to consider points of commonality as well as divergence between two distinctive schools. The legacy of Claude Lorrain s idealizing vision is visible in Jakob Hackert s magisterial view of ruins at Tivoli, near Rome, as well as in a more intimate but purely imaginary rural scene by Thomas Gainsborough, while cloud and tree studies by John Constable and Johann Georg von Dillis demonstrate the importance of drawing from life and the observation of natural phenomena. The important visionary strand of Romanticism is brought to the fore in a group of works centered on Friedrich s evocative Moonlit Landscape and Samuel Palmer s Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park. Both are exemplary of their creators intensely spiritual vision of nature as well as their strikingly different techniques, Friedrich s painstakingly fine detail contrasting with the dynamic freedom of Palmer s penwork. The most expansive and painterly works include Turner s St Goarshausen and Katz Castle, the luminous simplicity of Francis Towne s watercolor view of a wooded valley in Wales, and Friedrich s subtle wash drawing of a coastal meadow on the remote Baltic island of Rugen. Three small-scale drawings reveal a more introspective and intimate facet of the Romantic approach to landscape: Theodor Rehbenitz s fantastical medievalising scene, Palmer s meditative Haunted Stream, and lastly, Turner s Cologne, made as an illustration for The Life and Works of Lord Byron (1833).

Blake's only wood engravings, made near the end of his life for a school edition of Virgil, are among his most lyrical and enduringly influential creations. This is their first publication as a stand-alone book, with the original text of Ambrose Philips' version of the first Eclogue of Virgil.