Authors: J. B. Bullen
ISBN-13: 9780198182573, ISBN-10: 0198182570
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: June 1998
Edition: (Non-applicable)
University of Reading
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. This interdisciplinary study traces the sources of this critical reaction to the representation of the body in painting and poetry from the work of Millais and Morris to that of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. The book also explores how reactions were conditioned by such late nineteenth-century anxieties as fear of cholera and hatred of Catholicism, fascination with the fallen woman, horror at the 'shrieking sisterhood' of emancipated women, and even the terror of psycho-sexual diseases.
List of Illustrations | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
I | The Ugliness of Early Pre-Raphaelitism | 6 |
i | The Retrogressive Argument | 12 |
ii | Archaism | 20 |
iii | Pathological Discourse | 36 |
II | Rossetti, the Sexualized Woman, and the Late 1850s | 49 |
i | The Fallen Woman: 'Jenny' and Found | 53 |
ii | The Passionate Woman: Mary Magdalene, Guenevere, Jehane, and Lucrezia Borgia | 74 |
iii | The Sexualized Woman: Rossetti's Bocca baciata | 89 |
III | Rossetti and Male Desire | 110 |
i | Pygmalion and Rossetti's 'A Last Confession' | 111 |
ii | The Woman in the Mirror | 123 |
IV | Burne-Jones and the Aesthetic Body | 149 |
i | The Aesthetic Conspiracy | 157 |
ii | The Problems of Femininity and Effeminization | 164 |
iii | The Theology of Intensity | 179 |
iv | The Androgynous Mind | 182 |
v | The Pathology of Aestheticism | 194 |
vi | The Importance of Physiognomy | 204 |
vii | The Solitary Vice | 207 |
Conclusion | 217 | |
Bibliography | 221 | |
Index | 243 |