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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... once a special help and a challenge to a project that emphasizes the force of longing and the crises liable to be provoked by satisfaction . First , last , most generous , and most demanding reader , I am happy to have the oppor- tunity ...
... 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 important point of transition ...
... once about the endurance of things and the impermanence of individu- als , about the seductions of fame along with its evanescence . To describe Italy as a museum is to evoke the aspiration for a world like that imagined in the fanciful ...
... once a moralist and a psychologist , God summons an inborn despair to rescue the soul from selfish isolation : When she would think , where'er she turned her sight The airy hand confusion wrought , Wrote , " Mene , mene , " and divided ...
... once deeply personal and alien . " Is not this my place of strength / built for me , / Since my first mem- ory ? " — the unanswerable question at the heart of the poem is motivated by the dismayed recognition of a schism present from ...
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 |