Visualizing the islands of Napoleon: Napoleonic lieux de mémoire in nineteenth-century Britain

Visualizing the islands of Napoleon: Napoleonic lieux de mémoire in nineteenth-century Britain Public Deposited

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Creator

You, Ji Eun
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History

Abstract

Between Napoleon's exile to St. Helena in 1815 and his reburial in 1840, a vast repository of Napoleonic imagery appeared in Britain, where the political of national identity brought about an intense reflection on how to articulate the national past. Informed by Pierre Nora's notion of the intersection of memory, history and nation in sites of memory, or the lieux de mémoire, I examine how the memory of Napoleon was simultaneously crystallized and concealed through a popular motif of the three Napoleonic islands- Corsica, Elba and St. Helena. A close visual analysis on the representational space of the island images reveals the illusory masking of the vicariousness and elusiveness of British Napoleonic memories through strategic use of pictorial devices. Thus, through Napoleonic images of the mid-nineteenth century, this thesis explores the play of memory and history and their visualization in the in real and represented island spaces.

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