B.W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores ...
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The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers — Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James — to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.Less
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers — Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James — to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.
B. W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension ...
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This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.Less
This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.
Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and ...
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This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and visual art, and by her vitalistic interest in the energy of bodies. Lee began to explore the possibility of communal emotion, and how we might respond to the movements and gestures of others. However, this chapter shows how Lee struggled with her conception of empathy, both in terms of understanding how it might apply to the novel and to reading, and in terms of thinking about how feeling could be anything other than selfish: how it could be sympathetic. Her understanding of sympathy remains fragmentary, and implicitly suggests the need for the modernist techniques of Woolf and Lawrence. The chapter includes readings of Lee's novels Miss Brown and Louis Norbert, and her work on emotion and aesthetics.Less
This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and visual art, and by her vitalistic interest in the energy of bodies. Lee began to explore the possibility of communal emotion, and how we might respond to the movements and gestures of others. However, this chapter shows how Lee struggled with her conception of empathy, both in terms of understanding how it might apply to the novel and to reading, and in terms of thinking about how feeling could be anything other than selfish: how it could be sympathetic. Her understanding of sympathy remains fragmentary, and implicitly suggests the need for the modernist techniques of Woolf and Lawrence. The chapter includes readings of Lee's novels Miss Brown and Louis Norbert, and her work on emotion and aesthetics.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides ...
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This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral.Less
This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who ...
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This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.Less
This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.
Nicholas Dames
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199208968
- eISBN:
- 9780191695759
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208968.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter explores physiological novel theory's vexed relation with notions of ‘organic form’ by examining the discourse of psychophysics, a theory of the discrete building-blocks of ...
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This chapter explores physiological novel theory's vexed relation with notions of ‘organic form’ by examining the discourse of psychophysics, a theory of the discrete building-blocks of consciousness, and how its description of ‘units of consciousness’ made older notions of organic wholeness untenable, as reflected in both Vernon Lee's essays on the novel form and George Meredith's ostentatiously fragmented The Egoist (1879).Less
This chapter explores physiological novel theory's vexed relation with notions of ‘organic form’ by examining the discourse of psychophysics, a theory of the discrete building-blocks of consciousness, and how its description of ‘units of consciousness’ made older notions of organic wholeness untenable, as reflected in both Vernon Lee's essays on the novel form and George Meredith's ostentatiously fragmented The Egoist (1879).
Catherine Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719071447
- eISBN:
- 9781781701096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719071447.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the ...
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This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less
This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational ...
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This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational in professional literary study. Analyzing the literary critic Vernon Lee’s unusual synthesis of German physiological aesthetics, British aestheticism, and American quantitative textual analysis, the chapter shows how the concept of empathy became at once quantitative and embodied in Lee’s literary theory. In Beauty and Ugliness, Lee and her lover, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, developed strategies for empirical introspective analysis that were meant to demonstrate the effects of paintings and sculpture on the body. As Lee learned about the stylometric analysis of literature carried out in the United States, she expanded her empirical approach to include counting words and issuing surveys. Although this intersection of quantitative and affective approaches was largely disregarded by I.A. Richards and his progeny, it represents a vital prehistory of current approaches to the quantitative and empirical analysis of culture.Less
This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational in professional literary study. Analyzing the literary critic Vernon Lee’s unusual synthesis of German physiological aesthetics, British aestheticism, and American quantitative textual analysis, the chapter shows how the concept of empathy became at once quantitative and embodied in Lee’s literary theory. In Beauty and Ugliness, Lee and her lover, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, developed strategies for empirical introspective analysis that were meant to demonstrate the effects of paintings and sculpture on the body. As Lee learned about the stylometric analysis of literature carried out in the United States, she expanded her empirical approach to include counting words and issuing surveys. Although this intersection of quantitative and affective approaches was largely disregarded by I.A. Richards and his progeny, it represents a vital prehistory of current approaches to the quantitative and empirical analysis of culture.
Catherine Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198737827
- eISBN:
- 9780191801273
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198737827.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Early schooled in writing by a pedagogy rooted in dialogic exchange, Vernon Lee (1856–1935) made the interactive relationship between writer and reader central to her critical prose. Her early essays ...
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Early schooled in writing by a pedagogy rooted in dialogic exchange, Vernon Lee (1856–1935) made the interactive relationship between writer and reader central to her critical prose. Her early essays showcase her already distinctive prose voice—markedly different from a professional academic masculine voice. Quick to establish a rapport, Lee is a sympathetic guide, skilfully steering her readers through arguments and expositions, but also stimulating and involving them through impressionistic description, association, and intricate dynamic passages full of open-ended verb forms. Published in the 1890s and early 1900s, many of the essays in her innovative book The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (1923) show her fascination with the idea of style as a form of contact and transaction between writer and reader, with style creating the perceptual patterns that persuade readers to think and imagine in ways not naturally their own.Less
Early schooled in writing by a pedagogy rooted in dialogic exchange, Vernon Lee (1856–1935) made the interactive relationship between writer and reader central to her critical prose. Her early essays showcase her already distinctive prose voice—markedly different from a professional academic masculine voice. Quick to establish a rapport, Lee is a sympathetic guide, skilfully steering her readers through arguments and expositions, but also stimulating and involving them through impressionistic description, association, and intricate dynamic passages full of open-ended verb forms. Published in the 1890s and early 1900s, many of the essays in her innovative book The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (1923) show her fascination with the idea of style as a form of contact and transaction between writer and reader, with style creating the perceptual patterns that persuade readers to think and imagine in ways not naturally their own.
Karin Littau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676118
- eISBN:
- 9780748695096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676118.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter, written by Karin Littau, addresses the media-transitional period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to show how aestho-physiological experiments in reading were linked ...
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This chapter, written by Karin Littau, addresses the media-transitional period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to show how aestho-physiological experiments in reading were linked to a variety of motion picture technologies. On the one hand such technologies were used to measure reading speeds; on the other, they profoundly affected how readers began to perceive the printed word: no longer as static marks on the page but giving ‘the impression of movement’, which in turn was conceived ‘in proportion’ to how it ‘moved’ the reader. By focusing on experiments by Vernon Lee, Gertrude Stein, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and her story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (itself an experiment in phantasmagoric reading), Littau shows how reading during this period bore the traces of cinematicity; to the extent that in the 1930s ‘movie-minded’ writers like Robert Carlton Brown proposed ‘reading machines’, which would bring outmoded reading practices into line with modern cinema-viewing.Less
This chapter, written by Karin Littau, addresses the media-transitional period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to show how aestho-physiological experiments in reading were linked to a variety of motion picture technologies. On the one hand such technologies were used to measure reading speeds; on the other, they profoundly affected how readers began to perceive the printed word: no longer as static marks on the page but giving ‘the impression of movement’, which in turn was conceived ‘in proportion’ to how it ‘moved’ the reader. By focusing on experiments by Vernon Lee, Gertrude Stein, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and her story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (itself an experiment in phantasmagoric reading), Littau shows how reading during this period bore the traces of cinematicity; to the extent that in the 1930s ‘movie-minded’ writers like Robert Carlton Brown proposed ‘reading machines’, which would bring outmoded reading practices into line with modern cinema-viewing.
Jane Marcus
Jean Mills (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781949979299
- eISBN:
- 9781800341487
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979299.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also ...
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The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.Less
The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.
Meghan Marie Hammond
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines fellow feeling in Ford’s final Tietjens novel, Last Post (1928). In particular, the chapter tracks the ways in which eighteenth-century concepts of sympathy and ...
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This chapter examines fellow feeling in Ford’s final Tietjens novel, Last Post (1928). In particular, the chapter tracks the ways in which eighteenth-century concepts of sympathy and twentieth-century concepts of empathy come up against each other in Ford’s text. After an historical overview of sympathy and empathy, the chapter suggests that while the first three novels of Ford’s tetralogy move us toward an exemplary experience of empathy with the series’ protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, Last Post steps back from modernist empathy and represents Tietjens by way of abstraction and eighteenth-century sympathy. By analyzing how sympathy and empathy mediate the traumatic effects of war on the mind in Last Post, this chapter argues that the often-neglected fourth part of Ford’s tetralogy is in fact central to the series’ coherence.Less
This chapter examines fellow feeling in Ford’s final Tietjens novel, Last Post (1928). In particular, the chapter tracks the ways in which eighteenth-century concepts of sympathy and twentieth-century concepts of empathy come up against each other in Ford’s text. After an historical overview of sympathy and empathy, the chapter suggests that while the first three novels of Ford’s tetralogy move us toward an exemplary experience of empathy with the series’ protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, Last Post steps back from modernist empathy and represents Tietjens by way of abstraction and eighteenth-century sympathy. By analyzing how sympathy and empathy mediate the traumatic effects of war on the mind in Last Post, this chapter argues that the often-neglected fourth part of Ford’s tetralogy is in fact central to the series’ coherence.
Jonah Siegel
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198858003
- eISBN:
- 9780191890550
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The consolidation of the fields of art history and archeology in the nineteenth century was characterized by a number of fundamental revisions that were bound to track unevenly with developments in ...
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The consolidation of the fields of art history and archeology in the nineteenth century was characterized by a number of fundamental revisions that were bound to track unevenly with developments in taste. Shifts in aesthetic values and in the history of art itself presented unavoidable challenges to the status of major collections. And yet, some collections were so esteemed that it was difficult for public interest in them to shift along with the vicissitudes of advanced taste. This chapter analyzes the place of the Vatican museum in two distinct but characteristic works of the later part of the nineteenth century in which the intersection of the history of taste and individual aesthetic response is made a matter of deep affective significance: Vernon Lee’s essay, “The Child in the Vatican” and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Whether the experience of the sculpture collection at the Vatican becomes an occasion to represent an unresolvable emotional crisis framed around a formal issue, or an opportunity to address a formal issue given force by its manifestation as a profound emotional turning point, both texts register fundamental shifts in taste that were bound to affect the objects around which that taste had developed. By registering the limits of powerful concepts that had attempted to establish the relationship of subjects to admired objects, George Eliot and Vernon Lee reveal the emotional determinants and uncertainties accompanying and helping to shape the emergence of formal concerns out of material concepts.Less
The consolidation of the fields of art history and archeology in the nineteenth century was characterized by a number of fundamental revisions that were bound to track unevenly with developments in taste. Shifts in aesthetic values and in the history of art itself presented unavoidable challenges to the status of major collections. And yet, some collections were so esteemed that it was difficult for public interest in them to shift along with the vicissitudes of advanced taste. This chapter analyzes the place of the Vatican museum in two distinct but characteristic works of the later part of the nineteenth century in which the intersection of the history of taste and individual aesthetic response is made a matter of deep affective significance: Vernon Lee’s essay, “The Child in the Vatican” and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Whether the experience of the sculpture collection at the Vatican becomes an occasion to represent an unresolvable emotional crisis framed around a formal issue, or an opportunity to address a formal issue given force by its manifestation as a profound emotional turning point, both texts register fundamental shifts in taste that were bound to affect the objects around which that taste had developed. By registering the limits of powerful concepts that had attempted to establish the relationship of subjects to admired objects, George Eliot and Vernon Lee reveal the emotional determinants and uncertainties accompanying and helping to shape the emergence of formal concerns out of material concepts.
Diana Donald
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526115423
- eISBN:
- 9781526150479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526115430.00011
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
In the 1870s, information about the growing practice of vivisection, especially in physiological research, prompted a public outcry, and led to crisis and division in the animal protection movement. ...
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In the 1870s, information about the growing practice of vivisection, especially in physiological research, prompted a public outcry, and led to crisis and division in the animal protection movement. Women in particular, led by Frances Power Cobbe, opposed vivisection, leading to a battle with scientific and medical opinion that took on a strongly gendered element. Cobbe as virtual leader of the Victoria Street Society, resorted to many oppositional strategies, including a notorious poster campaign, which was replicated in images published in the Illustrated Police News, and also prosecution of a scientist who infringed the terms of the 1876 Act regulating vivisection. Failing in these gambits, Cobbe went on to attack the practice at the philosophical level, raising ethical issues that were also pondered by the writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Vivisection came to symbolise the materialism, misogyny and oppressive patriarchy of the age, and in this light it was anathematised by two early women doctors – Elizabeth Blackwell and Anna Kingsford – the latter a visionary who opposed vivisection as a spiritual blight on society.Less
In the 1870s, information about the growing practice of vivisection, especially in physiological research, prompted a public outcry, and led to crisis and division in the animal protection movement. Women in particular, led by Frances Power Cobbe, opposed vivisection, leading to a battle with scientific and medical opinion that took on a strongly gendered element. Cobbe as virtual leader of the Victoria Street Society, resorted to many oppositional strategies, including a notorious poster campaign, which was replicated in images published in the Illustrated Police News, and also prosecution of a scientist who infringed the terms of the 1876 Act regulating vivisection. Failing in these gambits, Cobbe went on to attack the practice at the philosophical level, raising ethical issues that were also pondered by the writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Vivisection came to symbolise the materialism, misogyny and oppressive patriarchy of the age, and in this light it was anathematised by two early women doctors – Elizabeth Blackwell and Anna Kingsford – the latter a visionary who opposed vivisection as a spiritual blight on society.
E. H. Wright
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781949979350
- eISBN:
- 9781800341807
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979350.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future ...
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After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future wars might be prevented. This essay explores the work of these women playwrights and makes comparisons between their dramas and Woolf’s thinking about war in her novels and Three Guineas. Woolf and playwrights such as Vernon Lee, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Box, Olive Popplewell and Elizabeth Rye ask us to examine nationalism as a catalyst for conflict and to take up the position of ‘outsiders’ in order to question our place in supporting future wars. In light of this, the essay will also address form, particularly pageantry as a mode that all these authors use to undermine the central purpose of pageantry which is to create the group cohesion that these writers believe leads to conflict.Less
After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future wars might be prevented. This essay explores the work of these women playwrights and makes comparisons between their dramas and Woolf’s thinking about war in her novels and Three Guineas. Woolf and playwrights such as Vernon Lee, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Box, Olive Popplewell and Elizabeth Rye ask us to examine nationalism as a catalyst for conflict and to take up the position of ‘outsiders’ in order to question our place in supporting future wars. In light of this, the essay will also address form, particularly pageantry as a mode that all these authors use to undermine the central purpose of pageantry which is to create the group cohesion that these writers believe leads to conflict.
Meghan Marie Hammond
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748690985
- eISBN:
- 9781474406376
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748690985.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier ...
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Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier (1915) and A Man Could Stand Up– (1926). This chapter suggests that Ford’s work contains a reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible theories of Lee and Hulme. A reading of The Good Soldier shows how Ford’s narrator exhibits an empathic drive to metaphorise other minds that fits with Lee’s ideas, but also makes use of linguistic patterns that Hulme would understand as abstract, and therefore anti-empathic, to cultivate fellow feeling. A complementary reading of A Man Could Stand Up– focuses on empathy’s role in the representation of war, arguing that empathic experience mediated through abstraction becomes the only way to meet Ford’s impressionistic goal of rendering the effects of modern warfare on the mind.Less
Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier (1915) and A Man Could Stand Up– (1926). This chapter suggests that Ford’s work contains a reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible theories of Lee and Hulme. A reading of The Good Soldier shows how Ford’s narrator exhibits an empathic drive to metaphorise other minds that fits with Lee’s ideas, but also makes use of linguistic patterns that Hulme would understand as abstract, and therefore anti-empathic, to cultivate fellow feeling. A complementary reading of A Man Could Stand Up– focuses on empathy’s role in the representation of war, arguing that empathic experience mediated through abstraction becomes the only way to meet Ford’s impressionistic goal of rendering the effects of modern warfare on the mind.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The Outward Mind argues that Victorian writers and scientists developed new and controversial accounts of aesthetic experience by returning attention to the human body and to the materiality of ...
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The Outward Mind argues that Victorian writers and scientists developed new and controversial accounts of aesthetic experience by returning attention to the human body and to the materiality of artworks. In contrast with accounts of the period that have understood aesthetic judgment as a mode of individual expression or self-cultivation, the book recovers a materialist science of aesthetics in which the experience of beauty was seen as a moment of unconscious contact between the human nervous system and the materiality of an art object. Analyzing archives related to literary figures such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater as well as biologists and psychologists such as Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and Vernon Lee, the book shows that scientists and literary intellectuals shared a project of turning the mind “outward” into a surrounding world of objects and things. Returning to this cross-disciplinary tradition of physiological aesthetics suggests that contemporary engagements between the humanities and sciences would benefit from attending more closely to a history in which scientific approaches to aesthetics were embraced. The book is organized by five categories through which Victorian thought gains purchase on key terms in contemporary critical practice: form, response, materiality, practice, and empathy. At a moment when neuroaesthetics, affect theory, new materialisms, and quantitative cultural analysis are increasingly drawing on the scientific method, The Outward Mind offers a literary and cultural history that shows how science and aesthetics have long been intertwined.Less
The Outward Mind argues that Victorian writers and scientists developed new and controversial accounts of aesthetic experience by returning attention to the human body and to the materiality of artworks. In contrast with accounts of the period that have understood aesthetic judgment as a mode of individual expression or self-cultivation, the book recovers a materialist science of aesthetics in which the experience of beauty was seen as a moment of unconscious contact between the human nervous system and the materiality of an art object. Analyzing archives related to literary figures such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater as well as biologists and psychologists such as Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and Vernon Lee, the book shows that scientists and literary intellectuals shared a project of turning the mind “outward” into a surrounding world of objects and things. Returning to this cross-disciplinary tradition of physiological aesthetics suggests that contemporary engagements between the humanities and sciences would benefit from attending more closely to a history in which scientific approaches to aesthetics were embraced. The book is organized by five categories through which Victorian thought gains purchase on key terms in contemporary critical practice: form, response, materiality, practice, and empathy. At a moment when neuroaesthetics, affect theory, new materialisms, and quantitative cultural analysis are increasingly drawing on the scientific method, The Outward Mind offers a literary and cultural history that shows how science and aesthetics have long been intertwined.
Mary Jean Corbett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781942954088
- eISBN:
- 9781786944122
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781942954088.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that contests between generations structure the literary field, this essay looks closely at Virginia Woolf’s attitudes to her older female contemporaries ...
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Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that contests between generations structure the literary field, this essay looks closely at Virginia Woolf’s attitudes to her older female contemporaries during the early part of her career, when as a newcomer she adopted a primarily agonistic relation to them. Her repudiation of such writers as Alice Meynell and Vernon Lee helped her to secure her own exceptional status. Yet once Woolf had achieved that status, she was more able to recognize her own implication in the competitive and hierarchical structures that constitute the literary field. By juxtaposing her public and private comments on Meynell and Lee from earlier and later in her career, we can register her subsequent re-valuation of at least some of the work of “the maternal generation.” As Woolf herself aged into an older generation, that is, she revisited her earlier judgments in a new spirit.Less
Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that contests between generations structure the literary field, this essay looks closely at Virginia Woolf’s attitudes to her older female contemporaries during the early part of her career, when as a newcomer she adopted a primarily agonistic relation to them. Her repudiation of such writers as Alice Meynell and Vernon Lee helped her to secure her own exceptional status. Yet once Woolf had achieved that status, she was more able to recognize her own implication in the competitive and hierarchical structures that constitute the literary field. By juxtaposing her public and private comments on Meynell and Lee from earlier and later in her career, we can register her subsequent re-valuation of at least some of the work of “the maternal generation.” As Woolf herself aged into an older generation, that is, she revisited her earlier judgments in a new spirit.
Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This conclusion draws together the three key authors of the study, considering how an examination of their work has illuminated a rich and complex form of sympathy. It suggests that these writers’ ...
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This conclusion draws together the three key authors of the study, considering how an examination of their work has illuminated a rich and complex form of sympathy. It suggests that these writers’ considerations of sympathy are entangled with the interest and pleasure of reading their work, and it concludes with a brief, speculative consideration of the relationship between reading, morality, and sympathy in their work.Less
This conclusion draws together the three key authors of the study, considering how an examination of their work has illuminated a rich and complex form of sympathy. It suggests that these writers’ considerations of sympathy are entangled with the interest and pleasure of reading their work, and it concludes with a brief, speculative consideration of the relationship between reading, morality, and sympathy in their work.
Marion Thain
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474415668
- eISBN:
- 9781474426855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415668.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The first case study to implement this way of reading takes Decadent poetry as its subject matter, with a particular focus on Arthur Symons (although with significant analysis also of Ernest Dowson, ...
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The first case study to implement this way of reading takes Decadent poetry as its subject matter, with a particular focus on Arthur Symons (although with significant analysis also of Ernest Dowson, and reference to other Decadents including Lionel Johnson). It argues for a phenomenology of poetic form, made possible by the strict, regular, forms favoured by the aesthetes; and for a new mode of lyric encounter emerging from this. Comparing this with idealist and impressionist modes, it argues that this poetry ‘made for the eye’ was often made for an distinctly embodied eye—and that the Victorian association between the book and the body offered new possibilities for lyric when combined with a Decadent erotics.Less
The first case study to implement this way of reading takes Decadent poetry as its subject matter, with a particular focus on Arthur Symons (although with significant analysis also of Ernest Dowson, and reference to other Decadents including Lionel Johnson). It argues for a phenomenology of poetic form, made possible by the strict, regular, forms favoured by the aesthetes; and for a new mode of lyric encounter emerging from this. Comparing this with idealist and impressionist modes, it argues that this poetry ‘made for the eye’ was often made for an distinctly embodied eye—and that the Victorian association between the book and the body offered new possibilities for lyric when combined with a Decadent erotics.
