The Emergence of Pre-Cinema: Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination [Paperback]

The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age, in the prose of Anne Radcliffe, the experiments of Friedrich Schlegel, and in Wordsworths Prelude. The book examines the cultural traces of the transformation of perception and representation in art, architecture, literature, and print culture, providing an indispensable background to any discussion of nineteenth-century culture at large and its striving for a figurative model of realism. Understanding the origins of nineteenth-century mimesis through an unacknowledged genealogy of visual practices helps also to redefine novel theory and points to the centrality of the new definition of historicism irradiating from Jena Romanticism for the structuringof modern cultural studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Emergence of Precinema.- Chapter 2 From Analogia Entis to the Threshold of Self-Reflexivity in the Poetry of Dante, Donne and Shakespeare.- Chapter 3 The Modern(ist) Reader: Friedrich Schlegels Fragments, the Emergence of Modern Philology and the Montage Effect of Industrial Modernity.- Chapter 4 A Map to the Panorama: the Self-reflexive Construction of Sight and the Flickering Shadows of the Phantasmagoria Effect in Ann Radcliffes Mysteries of Udolpho.- Chapter 5 Visions of the City of London: Mechanical Eye and Poetic Transcendence in Wordsworths PreludeBook 7.- Notes.- Bibliography.

Gabrieles book is an articulate, erudite, and readable contribution to Romantic-era scholarship at the intersection of literal£#