The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. By Gillen D'Arcy Wood. New York: Palgrave, 2001; pp. 273. $49.95 hardcover

Extract

The Shock of the Real treats the relationship between literary Romanticism and the visual popular culture of the late-eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Gillen D'Arcy Wood argues that the new visual culture of this period is the first phase of what we call “modernism,” and he claims that he will “illuminate the largely unwritten pre-history of our millennial visual age” (15). Wood's title is somewhat deceptive, since all but one of the eleven essays in the book focus on English Romanticism. His primary concern is the aesthetic debate provoked by the popularity of the new “realistic” visual culture: panoramas, theatrical spectacle, exhibitions, prints, book illustrations, and, finally, photography. Realistic spectacle delighted the masses and horrified the cultural elite in England. Wood examines the various ways in which the poets Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and the essayists Hazlitt and Lamb, participated in “the anti-visual culture prejudice” of the literary establishment in England.