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>