The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts

Abstract

The Romantic period (1780–1840) was a time of rapid change and experimentation in the fields of both art and literature. Advances in print production encouraged a growing number of readers to engage with the visual arts in a wide range of literary forms, while writers were instrumental in shaping emergent as well as evolving visual cultures. This companion maps this changing territory, with 27 chapters covering four key areas. The opening section treats foundational concepts in visual and aesthetic discourse in late eighteenth-century Britain, such as the Gothic, antiquarianism, orientalism, travel and tourism. Part two opens up wider questions of access and audience, by addressing collecting and patronage, portraiture, exhibition culture and consumerism, visual spectacles such as the panorama, theatre and the visual arts, building for art (galleries and other spaces for viewing art), public lectures, monuments and urban transformation, commemoration and the decorative arts, sound and image. Part three considers how the material conditions of book production, and emergent, print-based media, such as magazines and annuals, created new spaces for engagements with the visual arts, fostering collaborations between poets and painters, publishers and printmakers, and authors and their audiences. Chapters address intermediality and participatory consumption through topics such as the sister arts, the illustration of poetry and prose, portraits and caricatures of authors, print shops, albums and scrapbooking. A final section is devoted to the visual afterlives of Romanticism, from Victorian remediations of Romantic poetry, to film adaptations, fashion, graphic novels and comics.