Front cover image for Living forms : Romantics and the monumental figure

Living forms : Romantics and the monumental figure

"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."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2003
State University of New York Press, Albany, ©2003
Criticism, interpretation, etc
ix, 307 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
9780791455616, 9780791455623, 0791455610, 0791455629
48803508
Thoughts on Nelson's monument in St. Paul's
Imaginary museum
History's seen and unseen forms: Peacock and Shelley
Coleridge's Shakespeare gallery
Hazlitt's portraits: the informing principle
Symbolic forms: the sleeping children
Wordsworth's Prelude: objects that endure
Fortune's rhetoric: allegories for the dead
The mourner turned to stone: Byron and Hemans
"Those speechless shapes": Shelley's Rome
Keat's temples and shrines