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Fuseli's Milton Gallery Luisa Cale (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London)

Fuseli's Milton Gallery By Luisa Cale (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London)

Summary

Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures that were exhibited in London in 1799 and 1800. Starting from Fuseli's adaptation, Cale analyses how visual practices impact on the act of reading and calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices.

Fuseli's Milton Gallery Summary

Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators' by Luisa Cale (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London)

Fuseli's Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli's project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other 'classics' in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformed into repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national 'grand style' to fit the needs of a consumer society. Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To 'turn readers into spectators' meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli's Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses, let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli's embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This book analyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period.

Fuseli's Milton Gallery Reviews

Cale's capacious, adventurous study...is fresh and informative. ...across an admirable range of deftly, provocatively collated interests, Fuseli's Milton Gallery is informative, critically innovative, important work. * Susan J. Wolfson, Review of English Studies, Volume 58, Number 237 *
...interesting and accomplished...a detailed and well-researched study * Cambridge Quarterly *

About Luisa Cale (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London)

Luisa Cale is a Lecturer in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. She studied at the Universities of Rome 'La Sapienza', Genoa, and Oxford, and was a Junior Research Fellow at University College Oxford.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Turning Readers into Spectators ; 1. The Literary Galleries, the Market, and the Field of Art ; 2. The Spectator Turned Reader: Printed Text at the Galleries ; 3. The Reader Turned Spectator: Visual Narratives ; 4. 'Satan encount'ring Death, Sin interposing': Miltons Allegory and the Politics of Seeing ; 5. The Plot of Adam and Eve ; Conclusion ; Appendix: 'List of the Pictures in the Milton Gallery'

Additional information

NPB9780199267385
9780199267385
0199267383
Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators' by Luisa Cale (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London)
New
Hardback
Oxford University Press
2006-12-21
292
N/A
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