A fresh look at how literary and visual portraiture in the Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture
In this ambitious cross-disciplinary study, Elizabeth A. Fay examines the Romantic era in Britain as a transitional period leading to the modernist focus on identity formation and legibility. Inventing the term “portraitive mode” to describe a diversity of cultural and material expressions of identity, such as visual and verbal portraits, miniatures, poetry, caricatures, and biographical dictionaries, she examines a widespread cultural shift toward a world of faces and figures that foreshadows today’s increasingly common self-reflections and depictions.
Fay places portraiture within broader cultural currents, such as fashion and consumption, the rise of celebrity culture, personal collections and house museums, and travel literature. Synthesizing a vast array of material and tying together diverse artistic, literary, and cultural modes, she sheds new light on the historical significance of portraits and the centrality of Romantic portraiture as a vehicle for expression and subjective exploration.
Endorsements:
“Elizabeth Fay brilliantly illuminates that fertile intersection among the arts that is marked by what she calls portraitive practices, that intensely earnest variety of representational play that explores the uneasy connections and the insubstantial boundaries between the Romantic-era subject and object, as mediated both by visual portraiture and by verbal self-depiction. Theoretically subtle and culturally sophisticated, this is interdisciplinary scholarship at its best; it opens up remarkable new vistas on how we “see” the Romantics—and on how they “saw” themselves.”—Stephen C. Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished University Professor of English, University of Nebraska
“Richly exploring the “culture of looking” in the Romantic period, Elizabeth Fay’s new book alerts us to the ways that modern subjectivity came into being through a strange dependence on external reflections of itself. Fashioning Faces brings together a wide array of innovative cultural practices and “scenes” of display to argue that a fascination with reflexivity increasingly entered into the everyday in the early nineteenth century through a congruence of art, commerce, and technology. Mingling historical case studies with theoretical speculation, Fay’s cultural history is at once deeply informative and highly suggestive, moving easily from the popular appetite for “heads” and the implications of the pier glass to the aesthetics of Kant and the poetry of Keats. This is an important book, one that not only draws attention to overlooked dimensions of Romantic culture but also intersects in intriguing ways with key questions in our own time.”—Ina Ferris, Professor of English, University of Ottawa
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ELIZABETH FAY is professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has published several books, including Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal and A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism.
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