Gillen D'Arcy Wood. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University

Gillen D'Arcy Wood. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. 273. $59.95.

In The Shock of the Real, Gillen D'Arcy Wood revisits Romantic visuality to argue that it is in the Romantic period that a profound anxiety over the popularization and democratization of visual culture first takes hold. Pitting the "Romantic literary elite" against the masses, he reconstructs "the entrenched high/low cultural paradigm" (221) as one dependent on how the Romantic period received and reacted to ideas of the real and the ideal, the mimetic and the enhanced. Wood casts his net wide, and part of the interest of this book is how well he entwines familiar literary analyses with new investigations of what were, for the time, central concerns: the many and varied ways in which the British (mainly Londoners) could entertain themselves while simultaneously transforming expectations of what constituted "art" and "culture." Thus theatrical innovations (in set design, lighting, and acting...

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