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 SpencerWhen we think about the Victorian age, we usually envision people together with animals: the Queen and her pugs, the sportsman with horses and hounds, the big game hunter with his wild kill, the gentleman farmer with a prize bull. Harriet Ritvo here gives us a vivid picture of how animals figured in English thinking during the nineteenth century and, by extension, how they served as metaphors for human psychological needs and sociopolitical aspirations.
Victorian England was a period of burgeoning scientific cattle breeding and newly fashionable dog shows; an age of Empire and big game hunting; an era of reform and reformers that saw the birth of the Royal SPCA. Ritvo examines Victorian thinking about animals in the context of other lines of thought: evolution, class structure, popular science and natural history, imperial domination. The papers and publications of people and organizations concerned with agricultural breeding, veterinary medicine, the world of pets, vivisection and other humane causes, zoos, hunting at home and abroad, all reveal underlying assumptions and deeply held convictions—for example, about Britain’s imperial enterprise, social discipline, and the hierarchy of orders, in nature and in human society.
Thus this book contributes a new new topic of inquiry to Victorian studies; its combination of rhetorical analysis with more conventional methods of historical research offers a novel perspective on Victorian culture. And because nineteenth-century attitudes and practices were often the ancestors of contemporary ones, this perspective can also inform modern debates about human–animal interactions.
Hebrew and Hellene explores the intellectual and personal relations among John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater, three figures important in the development of nineteenth-century English thought and culture. Fundamentally concerned with the humanistic vision of Arnold and Pater, especially as they adapted the traditional religious culture to the needs of their generation, David DeLaura also recognizes Newman's central role. To a far greater degree than has been realized, Newman assumed a commanding position in the thought of the two younger men.
DeLaura seeks to define the mechanics of the process by which the conservative religious humanism of Newman could be exploited in the fluid, relativistic, and "aesthetic" humanism of Pater. The careers of Arnold and Pater are viewed as a continuing effort to reconcile the opposing forces of one of the central modern myths, the great cultural struggle between religious and secular values—Arnold's Hebraism and Hellenism.
DeLaura traces this important movement in nineteenth-century culture by studying the development of key phrases and ideas in the writings of the three men: the secularization of Newman's ideal of "inwardness" in Arnold's "criticism" and "culture" and in Pater's "impassioned contemplation"; the shared emphasis on an elite culture; the growing tendency to identify culture with the functions of traditional religion.
Newman, as the supreme apologist of both religious orthodoxy and the older Oxonian tradition, offered a rich arsenal to the defenders of a literary culture increasingly threatened by the utilitarian spirit (!nd by a rising scientific naturalism. Moreover, with the appearance of his Apologia in 1864, the "mystery" and the "miracle" of Newman's personality intrigued a new literary generation.
In Hebrew and Hellene DeLaura looks beyond the debates of the Late Victorians, the immediate inheritors of this legacy, to the continuing twentieth-century discussion of the nature of literature, its place in the humanizing process, and its role in a science-dominated civilization. He finds the problems faced by Pater, Arnold, and Newman—and some of their solutions—surprisingly relevant to unfinished contemporary debate.
In Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England, Rebecca Stern establishes fraud as a basic component of the Victorian popular imagination, key to its intimate, as well as corporate, systems of exchange. Although Victorian England is famous for revering the domestic realm as a sphere separate from the market and its concerns, actual households were hardly isolated havens of fiscal safety and innocence. Rather, the Victorian home was inevitably a marketplace, a site of purchase, exchange, and employment in which men and women hired or worked as servants, contracted marriages, managed children, and obtained furniture, clothing, food, and labor. Alongside the multiplication of joint-stock corporations and the rise of a credit-based economy, which dramatically increased fraud in the Victorian money market, the threat of swindling affected both actual household commerce and popular conceptions of ostensibly private, more emotive forms of exchange. Working with diverse primary material, including literature, legal cases, newspaper columns, illustrations, ballads, and pamphlets, Stern argues that the climate of fraud permeated Victorian popular ideologies about social transactions. Beyond providing a history of cases and categories of domestic deceit, Home Economics illustrates the diverse means by which Victorian culture engaged with, refuted, celebrated, represented, and consumed swindling in familial and other household relationships.
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