Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental FigureState University of New York Press, 2012 M02 1 - 317 pages Based on years of archival research in various British and American libraries, Living Forms examines the early nineteenth century's fascination with representations of the human form, particularly those from the past, which, having no adequate verbal explanatory text, are vulnerable to having their meanings erased by time. The author explores a variety of such representations and responses to them, including Coleridge's Shakespeare lectures, Hazlitt's essays on portraits, Keats's poems on mythic and sculpted figures, meditations by Byron's Childe Harold on the monuments of Italy, Felicia Hemans's verses on monuments to and by women, and Shelley's poems and letters on figures from Italy, Egypt, and other antique lands. Haley argues that in what has been called the "museum age," Romantics sought aesthetically to frame these figures as "living forms," mental images capable of realization in alternate modes or forms. |
Contents
1 | |
1 Imaginary Museum | 13 |
Peacock and Shelley | 35 |
3 Coleridges Shakespeare Gallery | 59 |
The Informing Principle | 83 |
The Sleeping Children | 111 |
Objects that Endure | 129 |
Allegories for the Dead | 147 |
Byron and Hemans | 165 |
Shelleys Rome | 193 |
10 Keatss Temples and Shrines | 219 |
Conclusion | 253 |
Notes | 259 |
281 | |
299 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Adonais aesthetic allegorical ancient antique artist beauty Belvedere Torso Byron canto Cenci character Childe Harold Church Monuments Coleridge Coleridge’s convey cultural dead death Defence depicted effect embodied Endymion essay eternal expression feeling Felicia Hemans figures Fortune’s rhetoric fragments Greek Hazlitt Hemans Hemans’s human Hyperion poems idea ideal imagination impression John Flaxman Keats Keats’s language Laocoon lectures Letters literary living form London man’s marble meaning melancholy memory mind modern monu monumental form mourning museum nature Niobe object Ozymandias painter painting past Peacock Peele Castle person picture poem poet poet’s poetic poetry poiein Portland Vase portrait Prelude present Prometheus Unbound reader record representation Romantic Rome ruins scene Schlegel sculpted sculpture sense Shakespeare shape Shelley Shelley’s shrine silent sonnet soul spirit stand statue stone symbol temple things thought tion tomb trans unity University Press viewer visual whole Winckelmann Wordsworth work’s