Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
12 - The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Rome is but one vast museum: Pompeii is a living antiquity.
This paper investigates the way particular locations in the Romantic period can operate as nodal points for the convergence of questions about materiality, representation, and presence. A location can be, in certain instances, a place of dislocation, or of emptiness, and scenes and sites of ruin, particularly, may evoke ideas of vacancy and oblivion even through their material presentness. Visitors to the entombed city of Pompeii, which was effectively frozen in time by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, have always been struck by the sense of walking back into the past, while at the same time experiencing, in the present, the overwhelming presence of death. Time has been, on the one hand, suspended – and history held in abeyance – while on the other, the very transience or vacancy of time is captured. What famously attracted Freud to Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novella Gradiva, set in the city of Pompeii, was this very idea of the past locked into and embedded in the present, which provided suggestive spatial and archaeological analogies for the aims and procedures of psychoanalysis. For the Romantic traveller, encountering the site in the early decades after its ‘rediscovery’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, the most striking feature of this ‘city of the dead’ was precisely the perception of the past co-mingling with the present.
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- Romantic LocalitiesEurope Writes Place, pp. 169 - 184Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014