Romanticism's Media and the Digital Piranesi

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Abstract: Giovanni Battista Piranesi's enchanting images are often also word-image composites that demand significant work from their readers. "The Digital Piranesi" animates the referential links that Piranesi forges within pages and across volumes. The digital environment offers a way of experiencing his works that library collections can rarely offer but that his original publications summoned. Building a digital repository requires a fresh perspective on print collections; such perspectives, as they emerge through a careful study of Piranesi's works, stand to enhance understandings of literary Romanticism's own uses of different media—the page, the book, and print itself.