About this Volume
About this Volume
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid, with essays by Sophie Thomas, Marcus Wood, Matthew Francis Rarey, Kay Dian Kriz, and Lucy Kamiko Hawkinson Traverse.
This volume is dedicated to both excavating the Romantic genealogies of visuality and charting directions for the ways in which the study of Romantic visual culture may redraw the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary bounds of Romanticism, bringing diverse, and in some instances new, objects and their ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes into view. The essays investigate three broad inquiries: 1) technologies of vision and objectivity’s slippages; 2) the indigenous or transplanted fruits of visuality’s New World Genealogies and 3) the role of proto-photography, panopticism, and slavery in the spectral formation of Romantic visuality. Emphasizing the ways we interpret visuality in romantic culture, the volume invites reconsideration of media, practices, and discourses that would seem to belong to earlier and later periods—from the artifacts and modes of viewing attached to curiosity and to technologies and ways of imaging and imagining that have become aligned with photography and the digital.
About the Design and Markup
This volume was designed at the University of Maryland by David Rettenmaier, Site Manager at Romantic Circles. The main banner image on the table of contents uses as its background Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, in which is Exhibited the Panorama, 1801 (aquatint) by Robert Mitchell (fl. 1782-1835). Private Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library. It is reproduced in full in Sophie Thomas' essay. The initial transformation from WORD Doc to TEI P5 was made using the OxGarage tool, with further TEI markup modifications according to RC house style applied by David Rettenmaier. TEI renders text in archival quality for better preservation and future access. Laura Mandell developed the modified versions of the XSLT transforms provided by the TEI that were used to convert the TEI files into HTML.
About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and most exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Jill H. Casid is a historian, theorist, practicing artist, and Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she founded and served as the first director of the Center for Visual Cultures. Her contributions to the transdisciplinary field of visual studies include her monographs Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2006,) which received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award, and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015), as well as the coedited volume Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Recent articles have appeared in Women and Performance, TDR, and the Journal of Visual Culture and she has contributed essays to, among other volumes, The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (Princeton, 2015), Architecture is All Over (Actar, 2015), A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2011), Landscape Theory (Routledge, 2007), and The Global Eighteenth-Century (Hopkins, 2005). She is currently completing her third single-author book, Forms-of-Life: Bioethics and Aesthetics at the Vital Edge and co-editing a volume of essays, The Deaths and Afterlives of Queer Theory with Michael Jay McClure.
Theresa M. Kelley is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here recent book, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2012), was awarded the 2012 British Society for the Science and Literature award for the best book in the field. She is the author of Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997), winner of the 2012 SCMLA Prize for the best scholarly book by an SCMLA scholar, and Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1988). She writes on Romantic poetics, aesthetics, visual culture, and philosophy. Her published essays range widely to consider John Keats, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Percy Shelley, William Blake, G. W. F. Hegel, J. W. von Goethe, and Theodor Adorno. She is writing two books, a study of how Romantic writers narrate possible futures, entitled Reading for the Future, and an investigation of color theory and global practice in the decades on both sides of 1800.
Sophie Thomas Sophie Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature. She is the author of Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (Routledge, 2008), and has contributed chapters to numerous books on Romantic literature and visual culture. She has published articles in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles, and the Journal of Literature and Science, and is currently working on a book about objects, collections, and museums in the Romantic period.
Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist and film maker, since 2003 he has also been Professor of English at the University of Sussex. For the last thirty years Marcus has been making art, and writing books about different ways in which the traumatic memory of slavery and colonization have been encoded in art and literature. Significant books include Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-1865 (Manchester University Press and Routledge New York, 2000); High Tar Babies: Race, Hatred, Slavery, Love (Clinamen Press, 2001); Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2003); The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (University of Georgia Press, 2010) and Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America, the first big study of the visual slavery propagandas of the two biggest slave cultures in the Atlantic Diaspora (OUP May 2013). His current book project is Exploding Archives: Meditations on Slavery, Brazil, America and the limits of cultural memory.
Matthew Francis Rarey is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. From 2013-2014, he held a Dana-Allen Fellowship in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of “Visualism” in Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Against the Discipline (Routledge, 2012) and “Counter-Witnessing the Visual Culture of Brazilian Slavery” in African Heritage and the Memory of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World (Cambria Press, forthcoming). He is currently at work on a book project on assemblage aesthetics and the visual culture of slavery in the African-Portuguese Atlantic.
Kay Dian Kriz is Professor Emerita of Art History at Brown University. She has published books and articles on British landscape painting and the visual culture of West Indian slavery and British colonialism. Her publications include The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (Yale, 1997) and Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (Yale, 2008). She also co-edited with Geoff Quilley An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830 (Manchester, 2003).
Lucy Kimiko Hawkinson Traverse is a Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a broad modernist interested in the transatlantic visual culture of the long nineteenth century, the history and theory of photography, the gendering and imaging of psychosomatic eccentricity, and visual experiences of the urban. Her dissertation, “Ectoplasmic Modernities: Materialization Photography at the Turn of the Century,” explores the transatlantic interest in psychical research at the fin de siècle, arguing that the “ectoplasmic” forces us to rethink modernism’s visual and conceptual relationship to the occult, and photography’s relationship to the history of science. This project has been supported by Chancellor’s Fellowships and a CLIR/Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources. Work from her dissertation research will appear in the forthcoming anthology Photography in Doubt (Routledge, 2015).
