Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-1-316-63534-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 106, 316 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 508 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hartley, Lucy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 19. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. 'Of universal or national interest': Charles Eastlake, the Fine Arts Commission, and the Reform of Taste; 2. Reconstituting publics for art: John Ruskin and the Appeal to Enlightened Interest; 3. The pleasures and perils of self-interest: calculating the passions in Walter Pater's essays; 4. Figuring the individual in the collective: the 'art-politics' of Edward Poynter and William Morris; 5. The humanist interest old and new: John Addington Symonds and the nature of liberty.

Über Autor(innen)

Hartley, Lucy
Lucy Hartley is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, 2001), and essays on a wide range of subjects including intellectual history and art history, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, and nineteenth-century aesthetic theories. She is the editor of The History of British Women's Writing, 1830–1880 (forthcoming).