Abstract

Introduction: Visuality's Romantic Genealogies

This introduction assesses the impact of visuality on Romantic literature and culture and its genealogies in the ongoing modern recognition of visuality as a cultural enterprise. The Romantic genealogies on display in this introduction include: visual representations of slavery, visual representations of slavery in Brazil, J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (Or Slavers Throwing Dying Slaves Overboard), Romantic panoramas as history painting, camera lucida, the solitary wandering artist and vagrancy in Romantic print culture, and Romantic technologies of perception, display, and exposure.