Product Description: The nineteenth century began with reverence for nature and ended with the apotheosis of art. In this wide-ranging excursion through the literature, visual arts, and natural sciences of the era from Wordsworth to Wilde, Carl Woodring traces shifting ideas and attitudes concerning nature, art, and the relations between the two...read more

Product Description: The book examines a wide range of Victorian literary, visual and historical representations of the Italian Renaissance. It looks at the High Renaissance poetic forms, such as the sonnet, by Victorian poets as diverse as Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore; at the poems and novels set in Renaissance Italy by writers such as Robert Browning and George Eliot; and at the different interpretations of the Renaissance put forward by cultural historians such as Ruskin, Pater and Symonds...read more

Product Description: From the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron to the painting of John Constable and Caspar David Friedrich to the precinematic institutions of the panorama and diorama, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism lends new vigor to ongoing debates about the nature of Romanticism, nineteenth-century culture, and the origins of cinema...read more

Product Description: In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice of Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig aesthetic tradition...read more

Product Description: CALLING OSCAR WILDE'S philosophy of art his "most elusive legacy," Brown attempts to define Wilde's conception of what art is and what it is not, of what the experience of art means in the modern world, and of the contradictory relations between the work of art and the sphere of everyday ethics...read more

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Product Description: This book examines the representation of a variety of arts--primarily painting, theater, and music--within the work of major nineteenth-century novelists. It charts a historical progression, from Romantic poetry, through mid-century Realism, to Aestheticism, showing how authors used references to other forms of art to illuminate their own aesthetic ideals...read more

Product Description: This study examines the role of indeterminacy - what Chesterton called «the final skepticism which can find no floor to the universe» - in nineteenth-century British art. Beginning in 1806 with Wordsworth's questioning of the essential ground and companionableness of things and concluding with Hardy's dramatization in Wessex Poems of the treacherous relationship between the word and the image, 'If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand' chronicles the growing sense of the antagonism of things as evidenced in the irreconcilable tension between the visual and the verbal...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Based on years of archival research in various British and American libraries, Living Forms examines the early nineteenth century's fascination with representations of the human form, particularly those from the past, which, having no adequate verbal explanatory text, are vulnerable to having their meanings erased by time. The author explores a variety of such representations and responses to them, including Coleridge's Shakespeare lectures, Hazlitt's essays on portraits, Keats's poems on mythic and sculpted figures, meditations by Byron's Childe Harold on the monuments of Italy, Felicia Hemans's verses on monuments to and by women, and Shelley's poems and letters on figures from Italy, Egypt, and other antique lands. Haley argues that in what has been called the "museum age," Romantics sought aesthetically to frame these figures as "living forms," mental images capable of realization in alternate modes or forms. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their mentor John Ruskin who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival...read more

Product Description: The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics...read more

Product Description: Illustrations have been an important element of many of the most extensively read editions of Shakespeare's plays, from the frontispieces to Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition to the multiple images placed within the text of Victorian editions...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays stems from the conference ‘Nineteenth-Century Literature and Aesthetics’, which was held at the University of Milan in 2006 and organised by the editors of this volume. The interface between word and image covered in these essays embraces the fields of literature, architecture, painting, photography, music and art criticism...read more

Product Description: Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed...read more