Nineteenth-Century Pygmalions: The Sexual Politics of Tactility

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-64
Author(s):  
Patricia Pulham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sexual Concerns ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Earthly Paradise

This chapter addresses the prevalence of the Pygmalion myth in Victorian fiction, considering works that have received comparatively little critical attention: George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), William Morris’s ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ from The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), and Thomas Woolner’s Pygmalion (1881). Opening with a discussion of Ovid’s Pygmalion and its influence on Romantic and late-Romantic writing, this chapter focuses on the ways in which the aesthetic and sexual concerns it raises inform and complicate negotiations of heterosexual desire and the ‘purity’ of the artist in the Victorian texts discussed. Demonstrating the slippage between living and sculpted women in such expressions of eroticism, this chapter explores the tensions between touch, animation and stasis that are at the heart of the book.

Worlds Enough

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As this book reveals, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, this book demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. The book analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. It concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, the book suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Revisiting the relationship between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain from the manufacturer’s perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Ann Compton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Drawing Board ◽  
Public Exposure ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Two Sectors

The mid-nineteenth century critical discourse compartmentalized art and industry by crediting each with specific powers. Manufacturing was identified with the development of technologically advanced processes, materials and products, while fine artists were given authority over the aesthetic aspects of industrial design. The idea that the two sectors had separate areas of responsibility has proved extremely enduring, and continues to influence our perceptions of Victorian manufacturing. This article contributes to the wider task of re-evaluating the relationship between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain by examining the role of design in potteries and art metalworking firms from the manufacturer’s perspective. It shows that contrary to the picture painted by Victorian critics, design was central to the ambitions and commercial operations of manufacturing businesses. Crucially, decisions about the recruitment of design staff were shaped by the close connection between the creation of new products at the drawing board, and their fabrication in the workshop. Since each branch of manufacturing had its distinctive characteristics, there were significant practical, aesthetic and commercial advantages for manufacturers in employing experienced designers who knew the trade, and were fully conversant with production practices. Unless a professional sculptor joined a firm, they were unlikely to have this inside knowledge, which made commissioning one-off designs from artists a riskier proposition. Manufacturers found that one of the best ways to get around this was to make reductions of sculptures, and initial demand for statuettes in Parian suggested they would be profitable for all concerned. In the end, the market did not live up to its early promise, but the publicity given to Parian statuettes compensated manufacturers and sculptors. Overall, it was this increased public exposure for art manufactures that was the prime benefit of the mid-nineteenth century critical discourse for the industrial sector.

scholarly journals “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

scholarly journals Images of the Gentleman in Victorian Fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Mahmut Terci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Complex Mixture ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Personal Virtue ◽  
Enormous Number ◽  
English Culture ◽  
Exact Definition

The term ‘gentleman’ has been used in English culture by an enormous number of people loading varied meanings to its concept. The idea of the ‘gentleman’ has attracted many historians, philosophers, religious figures and writers. Countless comments have been uttered and a large number of studies have been written about it and probably many more will be published in the future. Who were or are called gentlemen then or now? What qualities are necessary for a person to be a gentleman? How does a historian, a philosopher, a social scientist, a religious figure or a writer define the term gentleman? In which period of history being a gentleman was fashionable? The complex mixture of qualities expected in a gentleman such as his ‘birthright’, ‘education’, ‘wealth’, ‘income’, ‘vocation’, ‘civic responsibilities’ and ‘personal virtue’ have made it difficult to pinpoint exact definition. Although it has been hard for everybody to pinpoint an exact definition for the term because of its connotations with ‘masculinity’, ‘social class’, ‘manners’, ‘morality’ and ‘Englishness’ we have brought varied views of critics, writers and important figures to observe their point of views. We need to see the gentleman’s social position in the English gentry and his evolution from fifteenth century to nineteenth century. While the gentleman’s chivalric qualities used to play important roles as well as his social status and wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the gentleman’s manners and morals gained more importance in the coming up centuriesThe purpose of this paper is to offer a clearer picture of the concept of the gentleman especially in the Victorian times.

scholarly journals 'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Eleanor Alston
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Temporal Qualities

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-422
Author(s):  
Dory Agazarian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

William Morris’s ‘Work-Pleasure’: Literature, Science and Fine Art

2018 ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Arts And Crafts Movement ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter seeks to elucidate nineteenth-century conceptions of art as fine art. Taking its cue from Raymond Williams’s account of a divorce of (fine) art from (technical) work, the chapter pursues various attempts to define the aesthetic specificity of the fine arts, including literature in the narrow sense, in relation to other ways of exercising skill, including the use of experimental methods in the sciences. In this way, it seeks to show that the idea of the aesthetic, despite all attempts to purify it, remained deeply entangled in a net of work, in which experiences of pleasure (or beauty) and playfulness had not yet been separated from material practices of making useful things. As is further explained, the idea of a mutual inclusiveness of pleasure and use was pivotal to the arts and crafts movement, especially to the creative practice of William Morris. Finally, the chapter pursues Morris’s concept of “work-pleasure”, as derived from his News from Nowhere, through a wider debate about the complex relations between the sciences and the (fine) arts.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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