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Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London

Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London Joshua Swidzinski University of Portland In 1787, an itinerant Irish painter named Robert Barker patented the panorama: a vast, perfectly circular canvas housed in a specially built rotunda and lit in such a way that observers, viewing it from a central platform, could suppose themselves a part of the seamless, surrounding illusion. The innovation would prove to make Barker's fortune. In the 1790s, London became a city obsessed with panoramas and this obsession quickly spread to the Continent.1 Immersive cityscapes, battle scenes, and exotic locales could be experienced for the price of a shilling, bringing to life what went unillustrated by the newspapers.2 In his comprehensive study of the spectacle, Stephan Oettermann describes Barker's invention as "the first true visual mass medium" and a key precursor to a number of the visual technologies that would emerge during the nineteenth century.3 A wealth of recent literary criticism has asked how the panorama's novel manner of "conceptualizing and managing the field of the visible" influenced the Romantic imagination with regard to notions of the sublime.4 By and large, these accounts focus on the panorama's tendency to model a form of sublimity that disembodies and nationalizes vision. In Mary Favret's recent http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Eighteenth Century University of Pennsylvania Press

Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London

The Eighteenth Century , Volume 57 (3) – Nov 4, 2016

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Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press.
ISSN
1935-0201
Publisher site
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Abstract

Joshua Swidzinski University of Portland In 1787, an itinerant Irish painter named Robert Barker patented the panorama: a vast, perfectly circular canvas housed in a specially built rotunda and lit in such a way that observers, viewing it from a central platform, could suppose themselves a part of the seamless, surrounding illusion. The innovation would prove to make Barker's fortune. In the 1790s, London became a city obsessed with panoramas and this obsession quickly spread to the Continent.1 Immersive cityscapes, battle scenes, and exotic locales could be experienced for the price of a shilling, bringing to life what went unillustrated by the newspapers.2 In his comprehensive study of the spectacle, Stephan Oettermann describes Barker's invention as "the first true visual mass medium" and a key precursor to a number of the visual technologies that would emerge during the nineteenth century.3 A wealth of recent literary criticism has asked how the panorama's novel manner of "conceptualizing and managing the field of the visible" influenced the Romantic imagination with regard to notions of the sublime.4 By and large, these accounts focus on the panorama's tendency to model a form of sublimity that disembodies and nationalizes vision. In Mary Favret's recent

Journal

The Eighteenth CenturyUniversity of Pennsylvania Press

Published: Nov 4, 2016

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