Introduction: Romanticism and Vision

This special issue foregrounds new scholarship on Romanticism and vision. From its origins as a keyword for the visionary imagination, "vision" has in recent decades become an important lens for thinking about the embodied sense of sight and the aims and objectives of looking. The essays collected here contribute to the current work of reassessing Romantic approaches to and concerns over vision by exploring the tension between word and image, shifting paradigms in the theatrical and visual arts, and the social and political stakes of viewing, from the formation of the gaze, to sympathetic viewership, to the construction of bodily and racial difference.