After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England - Softcover

Prettejohn, Elizabeth

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9780813527512: After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813527511 ISBN 13: 9780813527512

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1999

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What happened in Victorian painting and sculpture after the Pre-Raphaelites? Aestheticism has been called the next avant-garde movement but attention has centered on literary figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. This volume is the first scholarship study of parallel trends in the visual arts, including the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon, and Albert Moore among others.

Victorian Aestheticism has often been traded as a frivolous elevation of art above the concerns of political and social life. This book reinterprets Aestheticism as a significant exploration of what it might mean to produce works of art in the modern world. The chapters address not only "art for art's sake" but also linkages with the realms of science and morality. A major concern is the relationship between art and sexuality, from the experiments of the Rossetti circle in the 1860s to the male nude in late-Victorian sculpture. Both homosexual and heterosexual eroticism emerge as key issues in the artistic debates of the late-Victorian period.

As a complement to the existing literature on Pre-Raphaelitism, this collection is essential reading for all students of nineteenth-century art, literature, and culture.

Contributors are: Caroline Arscott, Robyn Asleson, Colin Cruise, Whitney Davis, Kate Flint, Alastair Grieve, Michael Hatt, Anne Koval, Alison Smith, and Robin Spencer

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About the Author:

Elizabeth Prettejohn is Associate Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Plymouth. She has written and edited many titles on art history, including Interpreting Sargent and Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity.

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