The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age, in the prose of Anne Radcliffe, the experiments of Friedrich Schlegel, and in WordsworthsPrelude. The book examines the cultural traces of the transformation of perception and representation in art, architecture, literature, and print culture, providing an indispensable background to any discussion of nineteenth-century culture at large and its striving for a figurative model of realism. Understanding the origins of nineteenth-century mimesis through an unacknowledged genealogy of visual practices helps also to redefine novel theory and points to the centrality of the new definition of historicism irradiating from Jena Romanticism for the structuringof modern cultural studies.

Alberto Gabriele is the author ofReading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia andSensationalism and the forthcomingSensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective. He is working on a project on the global circulation of print culture in the 1860s and has been, most recently, a Macgeorge fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Emergence of Precinema.- Chapter 2 FromAnalogia Entis to the Threshold of Self-Reflexivity in the Poetry of Dante, Donne and Shakespeare.- Chapter 3 The Modern(ist) Reader: Friedrich SchlegelsFragments, the Emergence of Modern Philology and the Montage Effect of Industrial Modernity.- Chapter 4 A Map to the Panorama: the Self-reflexive Construction of Sight and the Flickering Shadows of the Phantasmagoria Effect in Ann RadcliffesMysteries of Udolpho.- Chapter 5 Visions of the City of London: Mechanical Eye and Poetic Transcendence in WordsworthsPreludeBook 7.- Notes.- Bibliography.