Sightseeing tour with spectacular views

William Galperin begins his book by noting the tendency of romantic art and literature to attach more obvious importance to imaginative appropriation than to mere seeing. He claims, none the less, "that a visible world - accessible to the material, bodily condition of sight and thus prior to idealisation - is manifest in certain texts, including verbal texts, of the British romantic period". The visible, it seems, has the power to re-erupt no matter how firmly it is subordinated to the visionary: it is "the central and unrivaled repressed of romanticism precisely because it has been repressed".

Galperin cites Sydney Morgan's experience of "distracting" effects when viewing "Alpine Scenery" at the Diorama (an exhibition of transparencies with changing light effects). One of the audience insists in recounting her own tour of the Alps and Italy "in an audible voice". Instead of becoming absorbed in the image before her, Lady Morgan is (understandably) caught up in the awareness that the woman is distracting her from this image. "The distraction that this woman represents," Galperin comments, "is important because it attests in no small measure both to her resistance to the illusion before her and to the resistance, by implication, of the Diorama to illusionism."

In analysing visual "distraction", the book explicitly invokes Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality. Whereas "the goal of absorption - and of much romantic art" is "to remove the beholder to a state of virtual disembodiment and authority", the effect of the Panorama was, on the contrary, "to recall the beholder to corporeality", by encouraging visitors to see themselves as part of a generalised public, experiencing the spectacle as "theatrical" visuality rather than as absorptive vision.

The plot of the visible eventually bouncing back in the face of an apparent triumph of the visionary recurs in each successive chapter, as the book focuses in turn on writings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the "antitheatrical" theatre criticism of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, and Byron's Childe Harold and Don Juan. One of the more lively sections is concerned with the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. As Harold merges with the narrator, Galperin suggests, he turns towards an internalised, feminised, maternal version of the visible - exemplified by the narrator's reverie, in the Coliseum, of the dying gladiator, who himself regresses in memory to the domestic scene of his "young barbarians" and "their Dacian mother". It is not entirely clear why all this is on the side of the visible rather than on the visionary, but it provides an opportunity for some perceptive analysis.

The Return of the Visible is often irritatingly tortuous: individual chapters repeatedly degenerate into a mass of detail, and lose the boldness of the initial argument. The book is none the less worth reading for the moments when odd flashes of insight banish an encroaching sense of pointlessness.

Chloe Chard lectures in contextual studies, Wimbledon School of Art.