Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-romance TraditionFor centuries, southern Europe, and Italy in particular, has offered writers far more than an evocative setting for important works of literature. The voyage south has been an integral part of the imagination of inspiration. Haunted Museum is a groundbreaking, in-depth look at fantasies of Italy from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, focusing on a literary tradition Jonah Siegel terms the "art romance"--the fantastic voyage south understood as the register of an ambivalent desire for art and a heightened experience of reality. Siegel argues that Italy's allure derives not only from its celebrated promise of unique natural beauty and prized antiquities, but from the opportunity it offers writers to place themselves in relation to a web of prior accounts of travel to the native land of genius. Beginning with Goethe as the founding figure of the tradition, Haunted Museum moves from a rich reframing of literature from the first half of the nineteenth century--including new readings of works by Byron, de Staël, Barrett Browning, and others--to an ambitious examination of Henry James's well-known engagement with Europe, newly understood as a response to this important literary legacy. Readings of works by Freud, Forster, Mann, and Proust demonstrate the longevity of the tradition of looking to Italy for the representation of desires as impossible to satisfy as they are to deny. |
From inside the book
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... beauty elegantly dis- played.1 At once souvenirs of a voyage and fantasies of a perfect collection of admired art , these works of Panini , of which several versions exist , all painted for foreigners , may be understood to occupy an ...
... beauty but the site of a much - desired physical liberation . As will be clear throughout this study , the distinction between physical passion and inspiration was not always clearly main- tained , even in cases where it might be ...
... beauty that had character- ized it up to this point in the poem , but to its source in her earliest desires and knowledge : " What ! is not this my place of strength , " she said , " My spacious mansion built for me , Whereof the strong ...
... beauty is transfigured into appalling images that are hellish , im- mediate , and grotesquely physical . It is little wonder that the soul is finally driven out of the palace of art and down to the valley where the rest of humanity ...
... beauty while the rest of the world suffers , but the realization that the museum itself is never newly constructed . Tennyson's poem offers a number of useful points of departure for thinking about the special kind of disappointment ...
Contents
The Song of Mignon | 21 |
The ArtRomance Tradition | 41 |
James in the Art Romance | 83 |
Henry James Impossible Artists and the Pleasures of Patronage | 85 |
The Museum in the Romance James with Hawthorne | 113 |
Speed Desire and the Museum The Golden Bowl as Art Romance | 149 |
Learned Longing Modernism and the End of the Art Romance | 171 |
Other editions - View all
Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-romance Tradition Jonah Siegel No preview available - 2005 |