The Pre-Raphaelite Body
Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:15th Jan '98
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Pre-Raphaelitism was the first avant-garde movement in Britain. It shocked its first audience, and as it modulated into Aestheticism it continued to disturb the British public. In this fresh and original study, Professor Bullen traces the sources of that shock to the representation of the human body. By examining the discourses which were developed to denounce or to explain the new art forms he shows that the distorted, maimed, or eroticized body formed the principal focus of anxiety in nineteenth-century criticism. Using a truly interdisciplinary method he relates the painting of Millais and other early Pre-Raphaelites to fears about cholera and Catholicism; he demonstrates how the body of the sexualized female became an object of obsessive fascination in the painting and poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris; he locates the writing of Swinburne and Prater in the context of the debate over the `Woman Question', and he shows how the responses to the `Aesthetic' painting of Burne-Jones were conditioned by the sexual psychopathology of mid nineteenth-century mental science.
There is no doubt about the impeccable scholarship of Prof. J B Bullen in this book. ... There are fine pieces of penetrating reading of key texts, extensive and accurate bibliographical data, and very competent nuggets of Victorian lore All this basic and reliable information is precious for the students discovering the period and what has been written about it. ,,, the book could easily be used for a foundation course on Pre-Raphaelitism ... should also be read by fellow specialists to spark off some interesting and enjoyable debates. * Jean-Marie Baissus/Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens No 48 (1998) *
This book is a study of art criticism and the depiction of the human body, rather than cultural gender constructions ... Bullen ... provides a challenge to the standard conceptions of medievalism in this period that can only enhance our understanding of this form of stylistic expression ... present new ideas and models that must be integrated into histories of these artists to more fully understand their productions, cultural milieu, and personal and reception histories. * Jason M. Rosenfeld, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies *
an important survey of discourses of Victorian malaise, a case-study in the topography of discontent ... Bullen's elegantly written book reveals a lexicon of discomfort with bodily images which violated conventional modes of visual representation, and which seemed, in their degeneracy, to endanger the nation's well-being. This is an illuminating study, an important source-text, a volume which throws light on cultural history, sexual mores, the formation of discourses on the aesthetic, and the purchase of culturally constructed gender roles on the reception of avant-garde Victorian paintin and poetry. * Francis O'Gorman, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, The Review of English Studies, vol 50, no 199, 1999 *
ISBN: 9780198182573
Dimensions: 225mm x 144mm x 20mm
Weight: 445g
256 pages