Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 PDF Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108335837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 PDF Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108335837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book

Book Description
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900 PDF Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108424139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Explores the failure of Romantic critiques of political economy, and the diminishing importance of aesthetic consciousness across the nineteenth century.

The Art of the Reprint

The Art of the Reprint PDF Author: Rosalind Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009272012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by four extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen's novels (1786-1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader.

The Art of Uncertainty

The Art of Uncertainty PDF Author: Daniel Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009436112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Daniel Williams shows how, in a profoundly numerical age, Victorian novels imagined thought and action in the face of uncertainty.

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910 PDF Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845975
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850 PDF Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351009508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy’s relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its ‘others’, including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic. Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Timothy Gao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108837166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Virtual, paracosmic, fictional -- Authorship, omnipotence, and Charlotte Bronte -- Plotting, improvisation, and Anthony Trollope -- Continuation, attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray -- Description, projection, and Charles.

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Matthew Sussman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108967248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
An innovative approach to literary stylistic analysis that targets students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture through provocative interpretations of style in Victorian novels and succinct revaluations of major figures in rhetoric, criticism, and philosophy.

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry PDF Author: Francesca Mackenney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages PDF Author: Eavan O'Dochartaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108834337
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.