The Shock of the Real
Subtitle: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: January 13, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780312226541
Subjects: Cultural studies; Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; Literary studies: 19th century; Romanticism; c 1700 to c 1800; c 1800 to c 1900; History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945); Arts, Modern; Art & Art Instruction; Europe - Great Britain - General; Literary Criticism; British Isles; United Kingdom, Great Britain; History - Romantic; Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; 18th century; 19th century; Romanticism in art
First sentence: The shock experience of modernity, as defined in my introduction, derives from the perceived realism of popular visual-cultural phenomena.
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 media age being born."--BOOK JACKET.