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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... important element in the history of the nineteenth - century culture of art ; it also presents an opportunity to study the disturbing relationship between desire and artifice as it has been imagined by writers for whom this relationship ...
... important for the emergence of a culturally dominant middle class in the nineteenth century.2 The tradition's representation of treasured destinations is therefore always as modern as it is nostalgic . Its evocation of memories of the ...
... important subdivisions . I have not shied away from mate- rial that has already had some life in critical discussion , however , because my priority is to make visible a line of connection that has been far from self - evident for ...
... important point of transition between the soon - to - be - outmoded culture of the Grand Tour and the emergence of a dream that was to preoccupy later eras , that of the perfect museum . For a vision of clarity and organization such as ...
... important degree already known . Although the museum and the voyage can seem all - too - material — and , indeed ... important cultural center : cer- tainty as to its importance cannot to be confused with clarity as to the sources of a ...
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 |