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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... recognize yet again the power of beginnings . My parents made the 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 ...
... recognize the tradition of the art ro- mance not only brings into view an important element in the history of the nineteenth - century culture of art ; it also presents an opportunity to study the disturbing relationship between desire ...
... recognizing the un- blinking artificiality of the romance as its only access to whatever of the real it is able to represent . While the cultural exploitation of an economi- cally faded southern Europe by a newly predominant North may ...
... recognized from early on a danger inherent in satisfaction itself . There is far more at stake than a romantic ... recognizes a recurrent anxiety : " If it were noth- ing else , the having the works of the great masters of former times ...
... recognizes familiar elements . From Goethe and beyond , the sense of recognition , of having seen before , of having heard before , of recognizing the never - before - seen is precisely the experience of the en- counter with the desired ...
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 |