Emergence of Pre-Cinema

Alberto Gabriele is the author of Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism and the forthcoming Sensationalism 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.

“Gabriele’s book is an articulate, erudite, and readable contribution to Romantic-era scholarship at the intersection of literary and visual studies in at least two obvious ways: he persuasively demonstrates the long history of the visual in Western Culture, undermining the myth of Romantic rupture, and, having done so—through careful reading of three essential authors of the ‘self-reflexive turn’ from the discourse-network of 1800—contributes greatly to our understanding of how this splitting of signifier from referent emerges with new forms of seeing.” (William S. Davis, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (1), 2019)

• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Emergence of Precinema.- Chapter 2 From Analogia Entis to the Threshold of Self-Reflexivity in the Poetry of Dante, Donne and Shakespeare.- Chapter 3 The Modern(ist) Reader: Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments, 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 Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho.- Chapter 5 Visions of the City of London: Mechanical Eye and Poetic Transcendence in Wordsworth’s Prelude—Book 7.- Notes.- Bibliography.