The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture

Download or read book The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture written by Catherine Holochwost and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination’s potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.