BiblioVault - Books about Nineteenth

Perspectives

Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England

Linda M. Shires

The Ohio State University Press

Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England reopens the question of classical perspective and its vicissitudes in aesthetic practice with a focus on texts of the 1830s to the end of the 1870s. Linda M. Shires demonstrates why and how artists and writers across media experimented with techniques of dissolution, combination, and multiple viewpoints much earlier in the century than intellectual historians generally assume.

Arguing for a relationship between what she calls the disappearing “I” in poetry, a compromised omniscience, and the testing of a mastering eye in painting and photography, Shires argues that art forms themselves, rather than new technologies alone, reshaped the period by educating readers and viewers into new ways of knowing. In chapters on visual and verbal art and a waning theocentrism; D.G. Rossetti; Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden; and Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Shires revitalizes the currently available scholarship on connections among nineteenth-century art forms.

This interdisciplinary study offers nuanced, close readings in order to rebut assertions of delayed artistic responses to the decreasing influence of traditional perspective. It shows how vision is bound up with all the senses of a viewer and it supports current concepts of modernism as transitional, rather than radical.

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The Trinity Circle

Anxiety, Intelligence, and Knowledge Creation in Nineteenth-Century England

William J. Ashworth

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

The Trinity Circle explores the creation of knowledge in nineteenth-century England, when any notion of a recognizably modern science was still nearly a century off, religion still infused all ways of elite knowing, and even those who denied its relevance had to work extremely hard to do so. The rise of capitalism during this period—embodied by secular faith, political radicalism, science, commerce, and industry—was, according to Anglican critics, undermining this spiritual world and challenging it with a superficial material one: a human-centric rationalist society hell-bent on measurable betterment via profit, consumption, and a prevalent notion of progress. Here, William J. Ashworth places the politics of science within a far more contested context. By focusing on the Trinity College circle, spearheaded from Cambridge by the polymath William Whewell, he details an ongoing struggle between the Established Church and a quest for change to the prevailing social hierarchy. His study presents a far from unified view of science and religion at a time when new ways of thinking threatened to divide England and even the Trinity College itself.

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Word Crimes

Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

Joss Marsh

University of Chicago Press, 1998

In 1883 the editor of a penny newspaper stood trial three times for the "obsolete" crime of blasphemy. The editor was G. W. Foote, the paper was the Freethinker, and the trial was the defining event of the decade. Foote's "martyrdom" completed blasphemy's nineteenth-century transformation from a religious offense to a class and cultural crime.

From extensive archival and literary research, Joss Marsh reconstructs a unified and particular account of blasphemy in Victorian England. Rewriting English history from the bottom up, she tells the forgotten stories of more than two hundred working-class "blasphemers," like Foote, whose stubborn refusal to silence their "hooligan" voices helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today. The new standards of criminality used to judge their "word crimes" rewrote the terms of literary judgment, demoting the Bible to literary masterpiece and raising Literature as the primary standard of Victorian cultural value.

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