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| | nzepc - Ian Wedde - Killeeen as History Painter |
 | | Let's now look at the history, which we are not calling an 'art history', in which Killeen is 'at home', so to speak - that history whose mode of allegorical history painting is driven and made puzzling primarily by the 'lost signified' of an acute historical consciousness. |
 | | This space between the pragmatic document and the imaginative construct, so ripe for allegory, and already well stocked with the 'absent signifieds' of literary texts, was complicated in the later half of the eighteenth century by the arrival of Romanticism. |
 | | The ghosts of texts, both fictional narratives and scientific briefs, which are the 'absent signified' of New Zealand's visual history, are joined at this early stage by themes of natural history observation, cartography and topography, ethnographic recording, and the kind of picturesque subject-matter associated with the then fashionable 'grand tour', especially of Italy. |
| www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz /authors/wedde/killeen.asp (2659 words) |
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