Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture

<p>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.</p>