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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... question of being abroad personal and urgent for me . I am often grateful to have had the chance to experience the imaginative boldness that has always taken them so far afield , and me sometimes with them . I am extremely grateful to ...
... question in Haunted Museum is not the voyage itself but the relation be- tween artistic self - imagination and the fantastic encounter with what Eu- rope stands for . Fantasies of access to the place of creative origin , the related but ...
... Question Although the kind of elation Goethe discovers on arrival in Rome is ex- pressed by literary visitor after visitor in later years , the fantastic harmony between creativity and sexual passion suggested in his verse is far rarer ...
... question is never answered directly . Indeed , the insistent conjunctions that characterize the stanzas that follow link nothing that is logically con- nected ; the parataxis serves rather to evoke the shock of sudden unpleasant ...
... question at the heart of the poem is motivated by the dismayed recognition of a schism present from the outset . The alienation of the self at the very moment its desire is satisfied is represented by the question that cannot be ...
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 |