Richard C. Maxwell (1948­-2010)
Photo: Mike Minehan

Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Yale University

Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Fall 2001

Richard Maxwell (1948-2010) was a poet, novelist, essayist, and a senior lecturer in comparative literature at Yale University. His scholarly career, spanning 30 years of teaching and writing, focused on the history of the novel and on the intersections between literature and art. His publications included The Mysteries of Paris and London (Virginia, 1992), The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650-1950 (Cambridge, 2009) and a range of scholarly collections and editions, including The Victorian Illustrated Book (Virginia ); the Penguin edition of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; and (with Katie Trumpener); The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, and Modern Philology’s centennial World Literature issue. Maxwell also served as editor of Powys Notes and The Powys Society Journal. He published over 40 reviews on film, art, and poetry; helped organize the British Art Center’s 2008 panorama conference and the 1919 European Studies Film Festival (held in 2010). He also served two year-long terms as the Valparaiso Research Professor.

Project Description

Tracing the Cultural, Aesthetic, and Epistemological Significance of Panorama Paintings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The panoramas of the nineteenth century were vast circular paintings, designed to surround the viewer and to simulate, in the process, all-embracing prospects of cities, nature, and historical events. These exhibits were once enormously popular, drawing huge crowds throughout Europe and the United States. However, panoramas are not only a lost form of entertainment; they are also a crucial clue to nineteenth-century or (alternately) modernist culture. Focusing on a small number of surviving examples, including a Berlin panorama–and also considering experimental variations on the form, in Berlin, London, and Paris–Richard Maxwell will explore the lasting power of these spectacular images. Maxwell’s talk begins from the premise that this site-specific nature of the traditional panorama was one of its crucial defining features. Both substituting for travel and occasioning it, panoramas sustained a highly peculiar relationship with the views they conveyed to eager contemporary audiences. While the panorama was supposed to be the most thoroughly realistic kind of image in its time, this general impact–seemingly guaranteed by an inimitable circularity–made it the ideal repository of collective fantasies, often utopian, sometimes dystopian in nature. The perfect view of the world was also, at times, a view of a perfect world—or occasionally of its frightening opposite.

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