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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... literary form and the desire for the South . It is also an essay on the vexed relations among originality , conven- tion , and passion . Though largely concentrating on the nineteenth cen- tury , my aim is to describe the links uniting ...
... literary or artistic ) that shaped the adult passion , in that way following the drives of the tradition itself , which is ever circling back to antecedents , to emblematic places or events identified by precursors . Indeed , these ...
... literary - historical terms in order to describe degrees of similarity among texts is to contend that more than individual idiosyncratic instances of influence are at stake in the interplay of works in the art romance . The extravagant ...
... literary descendant of the Grand Tour than the ancestor of imperial exploration , the mode also only goes so far with recent work on travel and wonder.3 This is a book about the kind of story that emerges at the confluence of two ...
... literary arts but subsequently the resting places for the chief relics of those traditions — these are inescapable histori- cal facts . That modern achievement came to find its validation in often unsatisfactory returns to these sources ...
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 |