Books in the Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts series

Sculpture was no occupation for a lady in Victorian Britain. Yet between 1837 and 1901 the number of professional female sculptors increased sixteen-fold. The four principal women sculptors of that era are the focus of this book. Once known for successful careers marked by commissions from the royal family, public bodies and private individuals, they are forgotten now. This book brings them back to light, addressing who they were, how they negotiated middle-class expectations and what kind of impact they had on changing gender roles. Based on their unpublished letters, papers and diaries coupled with contemporary portrayals of female sculptors by novelists, critics, essayists and colleagues, this is an unprecedented picture of the women sculptors' personal experience of preparing for and conducting careers as well as the public's perception of them. The author examines each woman's ability to use her position within the historical and cultural context as a platform from which to instigate change. The analytical emphasis throughout is on the art of negotiation and the result is an interdisciplinary work that delves deeply into the experience of an undervalued cohort of artists who had a disproportionate influence on Victorian social norms.

The intersection between space and narrative has often aroused critical interest, especially in cross-fertilization of language and imagination. In this title, the essays address ways in which three generations of British and American artists responded to these ontological changes, as they were both literally and metaphorically 'thrown' on roads.

Presents the viewpoints of a range of internationally distinguished critics and scholars, with diverse but closely related essays covering a wide range of fields, including literature, architecture, philosophy and musicology. This book addresses critical questions regarding the relationship between phenomenology and modernism.

Networks of Stone explores the social and creative processes of sculpture production in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Using the concept of art worlds, it analyses the contributions and interactions of all those who were in some way part of creating the sculpture set up in the sanctuaries and cemeteries of Athens. The choices that were made not only by patrons and sculptors but also by traders in various materials and a range of craftsmen all influenced the final appearance of these works of art. By looking beyond the sculptor to the network of craftsmen and patrons that constituted the art world, this study offers new insights into well-known archaeological evidence and some of the highlights of classical art history.

This book responds to the increase in live art programmed in many galleries and museums. The essays challenge the exclusion of live art from the the art history canon and explore participation, interactivity, digital and performative practices as presented in gallery spaces. Contributors include curators, academic scholars and practicing artists.

This collection of essays stems from the conference ¿Nineteenth-Century Literature and Aesthetics¿, which was held at the University of Milan in 2006 and organised by the editors of this volume. The interface between word and image covered in these essays embraces the fields of literature, architecture, painting, photography, music and art criticism. The authors stress the role of aesthetics in a number of contexts ranging from the early 1830s to the fin de siècle and beyond, as far as the last influences of Victorian taste on the early years of the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century the ancient interaction between literature and aesthetics was challenged and criticised by Martineau, Rossetti, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, Cameron and Carroll, among others: their awareness of the complexity of visual perception problematised the existing categories of realism, artistic conventions, discourse of description, translation and representation. The essays cover almost a century of debate between literature and aesthetics. They focus on the intersection of word and image by emphasising transgressions in art hierarchies, forms and languages, which restyle existing categories and project them into new aesthetic dimensions beyond the conventional idea of the sister arts.

Ut pictura poesis Horace said, but through the two millennia in which the sister arts have been compared, little has been said about the nature of sight itself. What we see in our mind's eye as we read has not been explored, though by following the visual prompts in texts, one can anatomize the process of visualization. The Poetics of Sight analyses the role of sight in memory, dream and popular culture and demonstrates the structure of a complex sight within the metaphors of Shakespeare, Pope and Dickens; and within the visual metaphors of Picasso, Magritte and Bacon. This book explores the difference between the great and the failed works of the supreme poet-painter, William Blake, and tracks the migrations of the Satiric muse between verbal mockery and scabrous images in Persius, Pope, Gillray and Gogol. It records the rise, and partial decline, of the vividly seen novel in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust and Hardy. The key concept throughout this book is visual metaphor, which in the twentieth century acquired overarching importance: in art from Picasso to Kapoor, in poetry from Eliot to Hughes, in aesthetics from Pound to Derrida. The book closes with a far-reaching definition of visual metaphor and with the great visual metaphor of the human body.

The figure of the beautiful reclining female sleeper is a recurring theme in the Victorian imagination. This book compiles and examines a corpus of Sleeping Beauties drawn from Victorian medical reports, literature and the arts and explores the significance of the enduring revival of the myth.

William Morris was one of the outstanding writers, artists and political activists of the nineteenth century. This book examines the significance of his legacy and his continuing influence in the twenty-first century. It contains essays from scholars and professionals researching and working in fields relevant to Morris's diverse interests.

This book examines the role and the meaning of collecting in the fiction of Henry James. Emerging as a refined consumerist practice at the end of the nineteenth century, collecting not only set new rules for appreciating art, but also helped to shape the aesthetic tenets of major literary movements such as naturalism and aestheticism. Although he befriended some of the greatest collectors of the age, in his narrative works James maintained a sceptical, if not openly critical, position towards collecting and its effects on appreciation. Likewise, he became increasingly reluctant to follow the fashionable trend of classifying and displaying art objects in the literary text, resorting to more complex forms of representation. Drawing from classic and contemporary aesthetics, as well as from sociology and material culture, this book fills a gap in Jamesian criticism, explaining how and why James's aversion towards collecting was central to the development of his fiction from the beginning of his career to the so-called major phase.

This book examines the many facets of the work of Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001). Klossowski first established himself as a writer and was known and admired by peers such as Bataille, Blanchot, Gide, Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan. But in 1972 he gave up writing to devote himself to his 'mutism': painting made up of large coloured drawings. In time he became as famous a painter as he had been a writer and theorist. Klossowski now has two separate groups of commentators: those concerned with his writings and those with his painting, with little overlap between the two. Here, this separation is explicitly removed. Klossowski's entire A uvre revolved around the concept of the gaze. Rarely has the gaze been so radically interpreted - as an active, mobile, evanescent object that breaks down the connections between representation and the visible. How is one to see the invisible divinity? This question plagued Klossowski, and he displaced it onto pornographic rituals. The pantomime of spirits is the scene, fixed in silence, where bodies meet - a knotting of desiring body and dogmatic theology. A creator of simulacra, Klossowski attempted to exorcise the 'obsessive constraint of the phantasm' that subjugated him in all these scenes. Translated from the French by Adrian Price in collaboration with Pamela King.

This book offers an interpretative key to Virginia Woolf's visual and spatial strategies by investigating their nature, role and function. The author examines long-debated theoretical and critical issues with their philosophical implications, as well as Woolf's commitment to contemporary aesthetic theories and practices. The analytical core of the book is introduced by a historical survey of the interart relationship and significant critical theories, with a focus on the context of Modernism. The author makes use of three investigative tools: descriptive visuality, the widely debated notion of spatial form, and cognitive visuality. The cognitive and remedial value of Woolf's visual and spatial strategies is demonstrated through an inter-textual analysis of To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts (with cross-references to Woolf's short stories and Jacob's Room). The development of Woolf's literary output is read in the light of a quest for unity, a formal attempt to restore parts to wholeness and to rescue Being from Nothingness.