Under the Hammer

Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-959165-7
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 238 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 224 mm, Gewicht: 398 g

Reihe: Clarendon Lectures in English

When we think of breaking images, we assume that it happens somewhere else. We also tend to think of iconoclasts as barbaric. Iconoclasts are people like the Taliban, who blew up Buddhist statues in 2001. We tend, that is, to look with horror on iconoclasm.

This book argues instead that iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we too did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643. That century of legislated early modern image breaking, exceptional in Europe for its jurisdictional extension and duration, stands at the core of this book. That's when written texts, especially poems, rather than
visual images became our living monuments.

Surely, though, the story of image breaking stops in the eighteenth century, with its enlightened cultivation of the visual arts and the art market. Not so, argues Under the Hammer: once started, iconoclasm is difficult to stop. It ripples through cultures, into the psyche, and it ripples through history. Museums may have protected images from the iconoclast's hammer, but also subject images to metaphorical iconoclasm. Aesthetics may have drawn a protective circle around the image, but
as it did so, it also neutralised the image.

The ripple effect also continues across the Atlantic, into puritan culture, into twentieth-century American Abstract Expressionism, and into the puritan temple of modern art. That, in fact, is where this book starts, with mid-twentieth-century abstract painting: the image has survived, just, but it bears the scars of a 500 year history.

Zielgruppe

Students and scholars of English literature and art historians

Autoren/Hrsg.

Simpson, James

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen: Religiöse Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Renaissance, Manierismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Contents
Figures
Introduction
1: Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts and The Museum of Modern Art
2: Learn to Die: Late Medieval English Images Before the Law
3: Statues of Liberty: Iconoclasm and Idolatry in the English Revolution
4: Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm and the Enlightenment
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was previously Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge (1999-2003). He is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (Longman, 1990); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry
(Cambridge University Press, 1995); Reform and Cultural Revolution, being Volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002) (winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, 2007); and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007)
(winner of the Silver Medal, 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards, religion category).