The entwining of the craft worker’s body both with the materials of her artistic process and with the craft object itself is central to an understanding of craft aesthetics. This paper addresses embodied craft in Lia Cook’s weavings, which foreground the artist’s body and the embodying dynamics of woven art. Cook’s work is read in relation to the Lady of Shalott, a fictional textile artist portrayed in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem by that name, and the painted versions of it by (...) William Holman Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. Cook’s work emerges as an elaboration upon Pre-Raphaelite ideas for the digital age, and a useful model for understanding the embodied dynamics of craft aesthetics. (shrink)

Simeon Solomon was a Pre-Raphaelite artist who navigated the modernity of VictorianEngland to create works revolving around explicitly Jewish themes; often creating overtly Jewish images, highly unusual among the generally explicitly Christian movement. This article will deal with how Solomon constructed and dealt with his own identity as a Gay, Jewish man in the modern, and heavily Christian environment of mid-nineteenth century Victorian London. Using contemporary approaches to historicism, observation, and spirituality, his works deal with the complexities of his identity (...) as Jewish and homosexual in a manner where neither was shameful, but rather, sources of inspiration. (shrink)

This book offers an original and challenging study of Marx's contact with the visual arts, aesthetic theories, and art policies in nineteenth-century Europe. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory in looking at Marx's views from an art-historical rather than from a literary perspective, and in placing those views in the context of the art practices, theories, and policies of Marx's own time. Dr Rose begins her work by discussing Marx's planned treatise on Romantic art of 1842 against (...) the background of the philosophical debates, cultural policies, and art practices of the 1840s, and looks in particular at the patronage given to the group of German artists known as the 'Nazarenes' in those years, who are discussed in relation to both the English Pre-Raphaelites, popular in the London known to Marx, and to the Russian Social Realists of the 1860s. The author goes on to consider claims of twentieth-century Marxist art theories and practices to have represented Marx's own views on art. The book the conflicting claims made on Marx's views by the Soviet avant-garde Constructivists of the 1920s and of the Socialist Realists who followed them are considered, and are related back to the aesthetic theories and practices discussed in the earlier chapters. (shrink)

Because of their basic level, textbooks show the assumptions and biases of art historians more clearly than does advanced, and therefore more restricted, scholarship. Textbooks are the rock, as it were, within which lie the strata of historical method. They bury, and so preserve for the good and ill of students , not so much individual historical data, which can be picked up or rejected rather easily, as those things which give the appearance of intellectual grasp to historical writing: its (...) generalizations, its interpretations, its sweeping perspectives. The successive editions of Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages can tell us much about the assumptions that have pervaded art historical education in America over the past century. The first edition, published fifty years ago last year, is worth looking at in some detail, because for all its seminal importance in the teaching of art history it is by now little more than a deposit in library stacks. A mere glance will show that it is not ours. Indeed, the distance we have gone since then is exactly measured by the gaucheries it displays. It is half the length of modern surveys, and it makes no pretense either to completeness or to objectivity. It is arranged by period and style until we reach the Renaissance , at which point, in keeping with the interest of an earlier age in national characteristics, each country receives its due chapter. The Italian Renaissance, as befits the central position of the primitives in American taste then, has four chapters to itself. Thereafter, except for a final, brief section on contemporary art, each national school is taken to the period of its decline. This, of course, will vary. France is taken through Cézanne; England through the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris; Spain, thanks to Goya, into the early nineteenth century; and Dutch and Flemish art only through the seventeenth century, but without Bosch or Bruegel. As for Germany, though the chapter heading promises us "From the Gothic Age to the Nineteenth Century," in fact it is on Durer and Holbein. What fulfills the promise of the title appears in its entirety thus: "After the death of these two masters, largely on account of exhaustion from wars there was very little production, until the second great manifestation of the German people came in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."1 No pretense here at dutiful compilation; high points, after all, are high points. · 1. Helen Gardner, Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its History and Significance , p. 345. Marcel Franciscono is the author of Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar. He is associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (shrink)

02 This gorgeous book presents and discusses the oils, works on paper, and other artistic creations of William Holman Hunt, one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. This gorgeous book presents and discusses the oils, works on paper, and other artistic creations of William Holman Hunt, one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

"Ruskin was the most important aesthetic authority of the 19th century. In his dozens of books and lectures he wrote about the qualities of art. the key figure, the history that connected one to another. In The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, Seven Lamps of Architecture he developed rules and standards that are amazingly contemporary in their range of sympathies. However, Ruskin wrote thousands of pages of criticism; for the modern reader his thought needs always to be rediscovered. This anthology (...) by Robert Herbert contains the essential thought of Ruskin on theory and practice (creativity, color, compositio, exhibiting workd of art), ("the nature of gothic," Venetian Renaissance, iron and glass as new materials for building), and sculpture and ornament (Greek, Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance). Herbert devotes his section on painting to Ruskin's remarks on Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, the Venetians, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, and many others. Ruskin was full of contradictions and quirks, but he is the one 19th-century critic who gave the 20th century many of its most progressive thoughts on architecture, painting, and relationship of art to a social and moral context."--BOOK COVER. (shrink)

In 1856, the English photographer Francis Frith set out on the first of three tours of Egypt and the Holy Lands. Traveling up the Nile and then on to the Sinai, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, Frith systematically crafted exquisite pictures of ruins, landscapes, and legendary sites. He then published his views in England and America in a variety of formats, becoming something of a celebrity in photographic circles. This book, the first to place Frith's Egyptian and Levantine images in cultural (...) context, reveals the distinct meanings these ostensibly "topographic" pictures held for the photographer and his Victorian audience. A Quaker by birth and an entrepreneur by nature, Frith brought to his photographic projects a sense of mission: to revive and confirm the stories of the Bible, while offering the region to armchair travelers as a seamless Oriental milieu of Romantic reverie. Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine narrates the political, intellectual, and social concerns that make Frith representative of England's encounter with the East in the nineteenth century. Historian of photography Douglas R. Nickel brings a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to bear on the subject in order to expose the complexity of Frith's image-making, setting the photographs against a Victorian backdrop of religious debate, imperialist thought, Romantic philosophy, and Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics. (shrink)

In the present article, I look into the culture-building power of Eros from Schiller’s ideas of “the aesthetic state of mind” in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, through the Pre-Raphaelites’ eroticism to the nineteenthcentury fin de siècle aestheticized homoeroticism and beyond. I argue that eroticism is a reaction to the increasing sense of alienation brought about by bourgeois modernity. The “moments” and texts used to illustrate the thesis that eroticism shaped an alternative order are far from exhausting a (...) very large list which could add nuances to the argument. The body is one of the essential aspects tackled, since eroticism cannot be conceived in its absence. The body may be an object of desire around which imagination weaves its yarn, or a blank page to be inscribed, or a danger zone, or a hypertrophied space projected by the lover’s longing for fusion. Eroticism in Salman Rushdie’s novels is the focus of my approach after a survey of some landmarks of erotic imagination. I argue that his novels are a new stage of the imagination infused by Eros. The article probes into how two centuries of aesthetic modernity have been shaped by the reality principle proposed by Schiller and how that essentially erotic model has suffered changes in time. (shrink)

Skeptical of the arguments put forth in Robert Duncan's long-awaited, post-humously published The H. D. Book, this review essay questions the elevation of Pre-Raphaelite, Aestheticist, and Decadent poetry that forms the basis of Duncan's revisionist canon—a revision in which Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot are dismissed as “merely rational,” while H. D. and Duncan himself are elevated to the uppermost ranks, just beneath Ezra Pound. The essay focuses on the peculiarity of “Wardour Street” diction returning to poetry in the (...) postmodern era (especially in the verse of Gjertrud Schnackenberg) and connects this development to the nostalgia evidenced in Duncan's occultism. Placing the New Critics with the poets Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur, Duncan dismisses them all as “academics” and “descendants of those ministers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, holding out against the magic of poetry as once they held out against the magic-religion of witch cults.” Emphasizing that it is the witch cults with which Duncan evidently sides, the essay concludes that Duncan's reranking of poets is no more reliable than his attitude toward rationality. (shrink)

‘Quot editores, tot Propertii’ has been a familiar—and much misunderstood—phrase in Propertian scholarship ever since it first appeared in the preface to Phillimore′s Oxford Classical Text of 1901. In its original context it described not an existing situation but rather the chaos that Phillimore alleged would result if editors began to adopt significant numbers of transpositions. Such chaos, however, does characterize the current state of Propertian studies; every interpreter seems to create a different Propertius, who in the last twenty-five years (...) has been represented as a feminist, a neurotic traumatized by the siege of Perugia, an anti-Augustan iconoclast, an apostle of love oppressed by a quasi-Stalinist principate, a decadent pre-Raphaelite, and most recently as the ‘modernist poet of antiquity’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:510 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Some women are plain. Not ugly, but plain, like bread without butter. It seems unfair at first. Why can’t we luxuriate in pools of Pre-Raphaelite hair? Why must we walk under dry brown bobs? Beauty is not shallow, although Ophelia drowned in a thin layer of oil paint brushed to look like water. Beauty’s naturally easy, but (...) plain takes cultivation. Sisters, listen. Plain becomes us. It’s a biome, not a state. It’s a wink: hey Tallgrass. It’s asters. Sisters, resist the nervous chorus that insists you’re beautiful in your own way. Say no. Say I am plain. Angela Sorby Limn Claire G. Moses Award for the Most Theoretically Innovative Article Published in the Journal in 2017 Feminist Studies is pleased to announce that Tara Daly is the winner of the 2017 “Claire G. Moses Annual Award for the Most Theoretically Innovative Article.” Daly was selected for her article “Christian Bendayán: Queering the Archive from Iquitos, Peru,” which was published in Volume 43, Number 2 (2017). In her article, Daly focuses on Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán, a visual artist who is of a cohort of Peruvian artists assembling a “counterarchive” that contests the heteronormative frame that has shaped how the Amazon has been imagined and represented. Daly shows how Bendayán effectively queers the archive and provides a compelling counterpoint to the way Iquitos has been historically understood. * * * The award, given to the most theoretically innovative article published in Feminist Studies each year, was created to honor Claire Goldberg Moses on her retirement as editorial director of Feminist Studies, a position she held from 1977 to 2011.... (shrink)

Sarah Angelina Acland is one of the most important photographers of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Daughter of the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, she was photographed by Lewis Carroll as a child, along with her close friend Ina Liddell, sister of Alice of Wonderland fame. The critic John Ruskin taught her art and she also knew many of the Pre-Raphaelites, holding Rossetti's palette for him as he painted the Oxford Union murals. At the age of nineteen (...) she met the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose influence is evident in her early work.Following in the footsteps of Cameron and Carroll Miss Acland first came to attention as a portraitist, photographing the illustrious visitors to her Oxford home. In 1899 she then turned to the challenge of colour photography, becoming, through work with the 'Sanger Shepherd process', the leading colour photographer of the day. Her colour photographs were regarded as the finest that had ever been seen by her contemporaries, several years before the release of the Lumière Autochrome system, which she also practised.This volume provides an introduction to Miss Acland's photography, illustrating more than 200 examples of her work, from portraits to picturesque views of the landscape and gardens of Madeira. Some fifty specimens of the photographic art and science of her peers from Bodleian collections are also reproduced for the first time, including four unrecorded child portraits by Carroll. Detailed descriptions accompany the images, explaining their interest and significance. The photographs not only shed important light on the history of photography in the period, but also offer a fascinating insight into the lives of a pre-eminent English family and their circle of friends. (shrink)

This paper was inspired by William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Light of the World.https://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/about/chaptel/Light%20of%20the%20world%202.JPG/view. It is a well-known Victorian oil painting with rich symbolism. In this essay I outline the context, describe the painting and reflect on the role of spirituality and contemplation in one’s work and personal life. I offer autoethnographic illustrations and argue that spirituality and contemplation make a positive contribution to wellbeing and can support one’s search for meaning, purpose and connectedness in the world.

There are, of course, many important differences between the deployment of cultural authority in the social context of second-century Christianity and that of twentieth-century academia. The editors of the Norton Anthology, for example, do not actively seek to suppress those voices which they exclude, nor are their principles for inclusion so narrowly defined as were the church fathers’. But the literary academy and its institutions developed from those of the Church and continue to wield a derivative, secular version of its (...) social and cultural authority. Since Matthew Arnold, the instutition of literature has been described in terms which liken its authority to that of religion, not only by outsiders—Woolf’s woman “divining the priest”—but by insiders who continue to employ the stances and language of religious authority; see, for instance, J. Hillis Miller’s credo in a recent issue of the ADE Bulletin: “I believe in the established canon of English and American literature and in the validity of the concept of privileged texts. I think it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the truth, to read Virginia Woolf.”9 Such rhetoric suggests that the religious resonances in literary texts are not entirely figurative, a point brought out strikingly by revisionary religious figures in feminist texts. In her recent essay “ ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Susan Gubar cites as some of the “many parables in an ongoing revisionary female theology” Florence Nightingale’s tentative prophecy that “the next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ,” H. D.’s blessed Lady carrying a “Bible of blank pages,” and Gertrude Stein’s celebration of The Mother of Us All.10 The revisionary female theology promoted in literary writing by women implicitly counters the patriarchal theology which is already inscribed in literature. The prophesied female Christ, blank Bible, and female Creator revise images familiar in the literary tradition, and, in contrast to earlier appropriations of religious imagery by Metaphysical, Pre-Raphaelite, and other poets, make visible the patriarchal preoccupations of literary “theology.” These voices, like the Gnostic voices recovered at Nag Hammadi, are only now being heard in chorus; and Pagels’ study of “the gnostic feminism” helps to illuminate some aspects of a cultural authority predicated on the suppression or domination of other voices. Christine Froula, associate professor of English at Yale University, is the author of A Guide to Ezra Pound’s “Selected Poems” and of the forthcoming “To Write Paradise”: Syle and Error in Pound’s Cantos. She is currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

In this volume, Lloyd Strickland makes the key philosophical writings of maverick Enlightenment philosopher André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716-1764) available in English for the first time. His writings contain many provocative ideas and arguments, and anticipate modern developments such as open theism, process theology, and animal theodicy.

Ce qui frappe chez Spinoza, c'est une volonté constamment manifestée de se rendre maître de son destin. Fils de notable, ses qualités intellectuelles laissaient augurer d'un brillant avenir dans la communauté judéo-portugaise d'Amsterdam. Mais il éprouva le besoin d'élargir son horizon intellectuel. La preuve en est son désir d'apprendre le latin, langue savante de l'Europe chrétienne. Ce fut alors la rupture avec les siens. En 1656, après avoir échappé au poignard d'un fanatique, il fut excommunié par le conseil des rabbins (...) pour hérésie. Devenu polisseur de verres optiques, Spinoza mena dès lors une vie simple et retirée, tout en restant attentif aux événements de l'époque, entouré d'un petit groupe d'amis sûrs. Spinoza fut le premier à proposer une exégèse rationaliste de la Bible, qui l'amena à formuler la distinction entre le croire et le savoir : Dieu n'est pas extérieur au monde, mais immanent à la nature, il est la Nature. Il réfuta également toute supériorité de l'âme sur le corps et substitua ainsi une éthique à la morale : il n'y a pas de Bien ni de Mal, mais du bon et du mauvais. Du Court traité à l'Éthique, en passant par le Traité théologicopolitique, Jean Préposiet a choisi de donner une vue panoramique du projet philosophique de Spinoza. Il suit pas à pas l'élaboration d'un système qui fut en même temps, pour son auteur, une manière de vivre. D'où la part centrale que tient dans l'ouvrage l'élément historique et biographique. Connu pour sa contribution à l'historiographie spinoziste internationale - Spinoza et la liberté des hommes, Bibliographie spinoziste -, Jean Préposiet est également l'auteur chez Tallandier d'une Histoire de l'anarchisme, ouvrage traduit en plusieurs langues. (shrink)

L'ordre juridique qui se met en place, en France, aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge a encore tout récemment été l'objet de riches débats : l'auto-développement des coutumes, l'autorité des droits savants et l'interventionnisme du roi de France ont notamment été au cœur de vives controverses historiographiques. La lecture des sources est à l'origine de querelles interprétatives, auxquelles s'ajoutent des difficultés méthodologiques que rencontrent les historiens du droit. Tandis que l'historien n'a accès qu'à une proportion infime du concret, celui-ci s'efforce (...) de combler ces lacunes, parfois même à l'aide d'une projection des catégories juridiques contemporaines. Cet anachronisme des concepts – parfois couplé à un anachronisme des faits – ne constitue-t-il pas l'un des vices rédhibitoires de la discipline? Cette méthode ne présente-t-elle pas, à l'inverse, une indéniable vertu heuristique et disciplinaire? Certains estiment alors que la théorie du droit est anhistorique, quand d'autres critiquent l'emploi par les historiens des concepts contemporains, comme la hiérarchie des normes, la souveraineté ou encore l'État. Outre de telles projections, c'est le sens donné à certains signifiants médiévaux ou modernes qui peut être relativisé, comme c'est le cas notamment pour les notions de droit positif, de droit commun ou encore de loi. Ces difficultés révèlent aussi à certains égards l'ambivalence de l'histoire du droit, écartelée entre science historique et dogmatique juridique. Ce livre propose alors une réflexion épistémologique sur l'un des grands enjeux de l'historiographie juridique contemporaine : peut-on penser l'ordre juridique médiéval et moderne à partir des catégories juridiques contemporaines? (shrink)

On new world order, internationalism, politics, and economic integration.