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Robert Upstone presents a survey of the pre-First World War group of British painters who produced images of gritty urban realism and sexual frankness. He focuses on the group's reaction to modernism and change and on their vision of Britishness.
This book is the first substantial study of the presence and relationship with the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in modern British art from 1914 to 1945, addressing how and why practitioners in both religious and secular spheres turned to the subjects. The volume examines British art and visual culture’s relationship with the then-contemporary anxieties and hopes regarding the orientation of society and culture, arguing that there is an acute relationship to the particular forms of cultural discourse of eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium. Chapters identify the continued relevance of religion and religious themes in British art during the period, and demonstrate t...
A provocative interdisciplinary study of the Victorian novel and Pre-Raphaelite art, this book offers a new understanding of Victorian novels through Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Concentrating on Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy and aligning each novelist with specific painters, this work interprets narrative redrawings of Pre-Raphaelite paintings within a range of cultural contexts as well as alongside recent theoretical work on gender. Letters, reviews, and journals convincingly reinforce the contentions about the novels and their connection with paintings. Featuring color reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, this book reveals the great achievement of Pr...
Exploring the effects of traveling, migration, and other forms of cultural contact, particularly within Europe, this edited collection explores the act of traveling and the representation of traveling by Irish men and women from diverse walks of life in the period between Grattan’s Parliament (1782) and World War I (1914). This was a period marked by an increasing physical and cultural mobility of Irish throughout Britain, Continental Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. Travel was undertaken for a variety of reasons: during the Romantic period, the ‘Grand Tour’ and what is now sometimes referred to as medical tourism brought Irish artists and intellectuals to Europe, where cultural exchanges with other writers, artists, and thinkers inspired them to introduce novel ideas and cultural forms to their Irish audiences. Showing this impact of the nineteenth-century Irish across national borders and their engagement with global cultural and linguistic traditions, the volume will provide novel insights into the transcultural spheres of the arts, literature, politics, and translation in which they were active.
A general introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, treating both literature and visual art.
Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s is an interdisciplinary study of the influence of the operas, writing, and personality of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) on the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Examining Beardsley's drawings and prose of the 1890s the study considers the ways in which Wagner's works were appropriated by this seminal figure of the British decadent movement. Despite recent critical interest in Beardsley and the 'fin-de-siècle', and considerable research on Wagnerism, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagernism in the 1890s is the first study in English to consider at length Wagner's presence in Beardsley's work. Beardsley combined allusions to the German composer with many of the touchstones of decadent art - the exotic, the morbid, the erotic, and the mannered. In exploring Beardsley's often iconoclastic versions - or perversions - of Wagner's work Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagernism in the 1890s aims to investigate the role of Wagnerism with 'fin-de-siècle' British culture, in particular the relations between Wagnerism and contemporary decadence.
Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and im...
William Orpen (1878-1931) was in 1917 appointed as an official war artist in France. He not only saw the Great War as a call to paint serious subject-matter—enabling him to break away from the constraints of society portraiture in London—but also as an opportunity to write. Orpen was commissioned, along with artists such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Wyndham Lewis, to paint for the Department of Information. He was the only war artist to keep a written record of his wartime experience, published in 1921 as An Onlooker in France. In his Preface, Orpen rather too modestly states: “This book must not be considered as a serious work on life in France behind the lines, it is merely an a...
Confessing that he may be acting "with more boldness than wisdom," Jefferson in November 1803 drafts a bill to create Orleans Territory, which he entrusts to John Breckinridge for introduction in the Senate. The administration sends stock certificates to France in payment for Louisiana. Relieved that affairs in the Mediterranean have improved with the evaporation of a threat of war with Morocco, the president does not know yet that Tripoli has captured the frigate Philadelphia with its officers and crew. He deals with never-ending issues of appointment to office and quarreling in his own party, while hearing that some Federalists are "as Bitter as wormwood." He shares seeds of the Venus flyt...
What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material ...