Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama - 9781138927728

Taylor & Francis

Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the crux of the encounter between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of \""acts of seeing\"" on the realist stage, Holzapfel demonstrates how theatre participated in modernity\u2019s aggressive interrogation of vision\u2019s residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers\u2014such as Diderot, Goethe, M\u00FCller, Helmholtz, and Galton\u2014exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. Realist artists across media paradoxically embraced this paradigm shift by focusing on the embodied observer. Drawing from extensive archival research,.