A Chimera Solidified in Stone: Spaces of Fantasy in the Works of Theophile Gautier.

摘要

This dissertation examines issues of spatial perception and representation in nineteenth-century French culture through the literary architectural fantasies of poet, novelist, journalist and art critic Theophile Gautier (1811-1872). Writing when popular imagination was preoccupied by newly built, newly ruined and newly discovered architectural spaces, and the realist literary representation of such spaces, Gautier imagines spaces of fantasy that offer innovative solutions to problems of spatial representation. Much like architectural fantasies designed by architects and visual artists, Gautier's literary architectural fantasies resist the closure, stability and conventionality of spatial binaries. They thereby expose the myopia of a purely realist gaze and render knowable what it is to perceive the world beyond stable spatial binaries such as interior/exterior. Gautier's spaces of fantasy compose a new vista from which to contemplate cultural phenomena concerned with the possibility of accurately seeing and displaying space and place.;Gautier was active and conversant in many domains of nineteenth-century artistic life, so my methodology is grounded in the interdisciplinarity inherent in his works. I investigate Gautier's aesthetic engagement with the Romantic conception of history, utopian socialist communities, dioramas and panoramas, tales of intoxication and madness, the archeological imagination, and the revival of French Gothic architecture. I also highlight the artistic dialogue Gautier held with the more renown authors of his century including Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Gerard de Nerval. Throughout the dissertation I analyze Gautier's abiding interest in the artists who epitomized the two poles of the Romantic architectural aesthetic: the prodigious, apocalyptic biblical spaces of English painter John Martin and the labyrinthine prisons of Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Gautier's literary architectural fantasies ultimately reveal themselves both as intensely subjective creations and as loci of intertextual creation where Gautier pays homage to his favored authors and artists while critiquing and investigating the ideas underpinning their works.