Books in the British Art: Global Contexts series

Examines colonial art through the lens of transculturation. This book includes essays which argue that, due to art's fundamental nature as spatial, art can illuminate imperial transculturation sites of border cultures and contact zones that go far beyond hybridities of national cultural traditions or conventions.

Living with the Royal Academy directs attention to the textures of artists' relationships with the Royal Academy in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain. This essay collection considers the Academy as a lived organism.

A monograph that discusses the Victorian critic Walter Pater's attitude to sculpture. It brings together Pater's aesthetic theories with his theories on language and writing, to demonstrate how his ideas of the visual and written language are closely interlinked. It throws light on the extraordinary complexity and coherence of Pater's writing.

Arguing in favour of renewed critical attention to the 'nation' as a category in art history, this study examines the intertwining of art theory, national identity and art production in Britain from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It offers an account of artwriting in the British context over the full extent of its development.

Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768-1848 offers a range of case studies which consider individual artists'' personal, professional and artistic relationships with the Royal Academy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bringing together the research of leading historians of British artistic culture during this period. Over its introduction and nine essays, this collection considers the Academy as a lived organism whose most effective role, following its establishment in 1768, was as a reference point towards, around and against which artists operated in their relationships with each other and with artistic practice itself. In so doing, this collection also considers the relationship between Academic ideals and individual practice (as well as lived experience) during this period of artΓÇÖs increasingly public manifestation at the Academy. Individual artists examined include Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright of Derby, Benjamin West and William Etty. Thinking beyond the dichotomy of loyalism and rebellion - and complicating notions of the Academy as a monolithic ossifying institution from which progressive artists would be ΓÇÖliberatedΓÇÖ in the wake of the Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodΓÇÖs emergence in 1848 - this volume investigates the AcademyΓÇÖs varied impact upon the lives, experiences and ideals of its diverse artistic communities.

Examining colonial art through the lens of transculturation, the essays in this collection assess painting, sculpture, photography, illustration and architecture from 1770 to 1930 to map these art works'' complex and unresolved meanings illuminated by the concept of transculturation. Authors explore works in which transculturation itself was being defined, formed, negotiated, and represented in the British Empire and in countries subject to British influence (the Congo Free State, Japan, Turkey) through cross-cultural encounters of two kinds: works created in the colonies subject over time to colonial and to postcolonial spectators'' receptions, and copies or multiples of works that traveled across space located in several colonies or between a colony and the metropole, thus subject to multiple cultural interpretations.