Yuriko Saito
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199278350
- eISBN:
- 9780191707001
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278350.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
We normally react to manifestations of aging and different degrees of cleanliness and organization by cleaning, organizing, restoring, or discarding. These familiar reactions are rather complex, ...
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We normally react to manifestations of aging and different degrees of cleanliness and organization by cleaning, organizing, restoring, or discarding. These familiar reactions are rather complex, presupposing various conceptual considerations, including functionality, context, and personal relationship to the object. The appreciation of aged, messy, or defective appearance was encouraged by the British picturesque movement with its cult of ruins, Japanese wabi aesthetics underlie the tea ceremony, and rebellion against modernist aesthetics reveals a tension between our desire for control over life and the wisdom of submitting to its transient and other uncontrollable aspects. It also creates another tension: to decontextualize those qualities ordinarily depreciated to illuminate their positive aesthetic potential, while analyzing our common reactions to them in the ordinary context. Finally, the discussion highlights the danger of utilizing the power of the aesthetic through aestheticizing the social status quo and transience of life by taking examples from Japanese history.Less
We normally react to manifestations of aging and different degrees of cleanliness and organization by cleaning, organizing, restoring, or discarding. These familiar reactions are rather complex, presupposing various conceptual considerations, including functionality, context, and personal relationship to the object. The appreciation of aged, messy, or defective appearance was encouraged by the British picturesque movement with its cult of ruins, Japanese wabi aesthetics underlie the tea ceremony, and rebellion against modernist aesthetics reveals a tension between our desire for control over life and the wisdom of submitting to its transient and other uncontrollable aspects. It also creates another tension: to decontextualize those qualities ordinarily depreciated to illuminate their positive aesthetic potential, while analyzing our common reactions to them in the ordinary context. Finally, the discussion highlights the danger of utilizing the power of the aesthetic through aestheticizing the social status quo and transience of life by taking examples from Japanese history.
Murray Pittock
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232796
- eISBN:
- 9780191716409
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232796.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter examines Sir Walter Scott's emplacement of the structures of Enlightenment historiography in his fiction, and the tension between romance and history in his work. There is an examination ...
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This chapter examines Sir Walter Scott's emplacement of the structures of Enlightenment historiography in his fiction, and the tension between romance and history in his work. There is an examination of how his writing implements, problematizes, and transcends the models he inherits, and some consideration of how it was read and utilized differently in Continental Europe.Less
This chapter examines Sir Walter Scott's emplacement of the structures of Enlightenment historiography in his fiction, and the tension between romance and history in his work. There is an examination of how his writing implements, problematizes, and transcends the models he inherits, and some consideration of how it was read and utilized differently in Continental Europe.
Ralph Pite
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199588541
- eISBN:
- 9780191741845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588541.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Romanticism can be understood as based upon and leading to a rejection of Rome and a love of Greece. This book challenges this model by showing the complex engagement that took place between Romantic ...
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Romanticism can be understood as based upon and leading to a rejection of Rome and a love of Greece. This book challenges this model by showing the complex engagement that took place between Romantic period writers and the specifically Roman elements of their classical inheritance. In particular, Rome provided a focus for discussion of how to co-ordinate present and past, cultural inheritance and contemporary experience. This introductory chapter contrasts firstly Hölderlin and Goethe, and then Shelley and Byron, in order to exemplify two of the dominant ways in which that co-ordination was attempted. It concludes with Stendhal, and his differing perspective on Rome. Stendhal's point of view is aligned with the aesthetics of the picturesque and is seen as implying both a different relation to the classical past and a new historiography.Less
Romanticism can be understood as based upon and leading to a rejection of Rome and a love of Greece. This book challenges this model by showing the complex engagement that took place between Romantic period writers and the specifically Roman elements of their classical inheritance. In particular, Rome provided a focus for discussion of how to co-ordinate present and past, cultural inheritance and contemporary experience. This introductory chapter contrasts firstly Hölderlin and Goethe, and then Shelley and Byron, in order to exemplify two of the dominant ways in which that co-ordination was attempted. It concludes with Stendhal, and his differing perspective on Rome. Stendhal's point of view is aligned with the aesthetics of the picturesque and is seen as implying both a different relation to the classical past and a new historiography.
Carl Thompson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199259984
- eISBN:
- 9780191717413
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199259984.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter situates Romantic acts of travel in their larger context, which is the upsurge of tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The various modes of tourism that emerge in this ...
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This chapter situates Romantic acts of travel in their larger context, which is the upsurge of tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The various modes of tourism that emerge in this period are discussed, as well as its corollary: a growing ethos of anti-tourism amongst some travellers. The chapter then goes on to discuss the forms of contemporary tourism that most irritated or unsettled the Romantic imagination, notably the Grand Tour, the picturesque tour, and the rise in the number of women travellers. It also explores some of the practices by which Romantic travellers defined themselves against these tourists, such as pedestrianism.Less
This chapter situates Romantic acts of travel in their larger context, which is the upsurge of tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The various modes of tourism that emerge in this period are discussed, as well as its corollary: a growing ethos of anti-tourism amongst some travellers. The chapter then goes on to discuss the forms of contemporary tourism that most irritated or unsettled the Romantic imagination, notably the Grand Tour, the picturesque tour, and the rise in the number of women travellers. It also explores some of the practices by which Romantic travellers defined themselves against these tourists, such as pedestrianism.
Andrew Lawson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199828050
- eISBN:
- 9780199933334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199828050.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter describes Howells’s early life on the Ohio frontier in a lower-middle-class family destabilized by his father’s repeated business failures. It shows how this experience left Howells with ...
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This chapter describes Howells’s early life on the Ohio frontier in a lower-middle-class family destabilized by his father’s repeated business failures. It shows how this experience left Howells with lasting fears of falling and of drowning. The chapter traces the economic and psychological meanings of the recurring tropes of buoyancy and drowning in Howells’s early work, from Venetian Life (1866) to A Modern Instance (1882). It argues that Howells’s obsession with contingency and chance derives from his experience of the floating world of antebellum capitalism: an experience he draws on in order to resist the sense of entitlement and privilege of the Boston Brahmin class he joined.Less
This chapter describes Howells’s early life on the Ohio frontier in a lower-middle-class family destabilized by his father’s repeated business failures. It shows how this experience left Howells with lasting fears of falling and of drowning. The chapter traces the economic and psychological meanings of the recurring tropes of buoyancy and drowning in Howells’s early work, from Venetian Life (1866) to A Modern Instance (1882). It argues that Howells’s obsession with contingency and chance derives from his experience of the floating world of antebellum capitalism: an experience he draws on in order to resist the sense of entitlement and privilege of the Boston Brahmin class he joined.
Elizabeth R. Napier
- Published in print:
- 1987
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128601
- eISBN:
- 9780191671678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128601.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter shows that although the Gothic is in many important respects conventional and highly fixed in form, there appears among the writers of the genre not only a certain distrust in the ...
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This chapter shows that although the Gothic is in many important respects conventional and highly fixed in form, there appears among the writers of the genre not only a certain distrust in the stability of the conventions that they use but a sense that stability itself is less interesting than moments of suspense or irresolution. The artful disequilibrium of the Gothic is achieved in a number of ways. Not only do the Gothic writers make full conventional use of stylistic devices such as exaggeration, interruption, and fragmentation to destabilize their narratives; this stylistic instability is supplemented by a peculiar tonal imbalance as well as one that might be called modal or generic. The effect of these distortions is a stylistic reproduction of paradox, of irregularity and decay that is akin to the aesthetic values of Price, Knight, and Gilpin, the main theoreticians of the picturesque.Less
This chapter shows that although the Gothic is in many important respects conventional and highly fixed in form, there appears among the writers of the genre not only a certain distrust in the stability of the conventions that they use but a sense that stability itself is less interesting than moments of suspense or irresolution. The artful disequilibrium of the Gothic is achieved in a number of ways. Not only do the Gothic writers make full conventional use of stylistic devices such as exaggeration, interruption, and fragmentation to destabilize their narratives; this stylistic instability is supplemented by a peculiar tonal imbalance as well as one that might be called modal or generic. The effect of these distortions is a stylistic reproduction of paradox, of irregularity and decay that is akin to the aesthetic values of Price, Knight, and Gilpin, the main theoreticians of the picturesque.
Cynthia Wall
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226467665
- eISBN:
- 9780226467979
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226467979.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new ...
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This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new perceptual experience that visually explains a wider set of changing formal patterns and fundamental principles. The printed page underwent sweeping typographical modernizations: common nouns lost their capitals; proper nouns, their italics. The new uniformity paradoxically allowed more visibility to the "lesser parts" of speech, no longer visibly dominated by nouns. Grammarians began to pay more attention to things like prepositions, and narrative patterns in literature developed more prepositional play. The new linguistic approach inspired new narrative approaches, such as free indirect discourse. Examining the work of landscape theorists alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and novels, this book reveals a new landscaping across disciplines--new approaches to perceiving and representing the world in word and image.Less
This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new perceptual experience that visually explains a wider set of changing formal patterns and fundamental principles. The printed page underwent sweeping typographical modernizations: common nouns lost their capitals; proper nouns, their italics. The new uniformity paradoxically allowed more visibility to the "lesser parts" of speech, no longer visibly dominated by nouns. Grammarians began to pay more attention to things like prepositions, and narrative patterns in literature developed more prepositional play. The new linguistic approach inspired new narrative approaches, such as free indirect discourse. Examining the work of landscape theorists alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and novels, this book reveals a new landscaping across disciplines--new approaches to perceiving and representing the world in word and image.
Rachel Teukolsky
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198859734
- eISBN:
- 9780191892080
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198859734.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Many visual media that we take for granted today were in fact invented in the nineteenth century. New technologies led to the creation of new media such as the illustrated newspaper, the cheap ...
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Many visual media that we take for granted today were in fact invented in the nineteenth century. New technologies led to the creation of new media such as the illustrated newspaper, the cheap caricature cartoon, the affordable illustrated book, the portrait photograph, and the advertising poster. Though these objects might seem like throwaway ephemera, Picture World argues that they were crucial parts of nineteenth-century everyday life. Studying these ubiquitous pictures in fact helps us to revise common understandings of key aesthetic concepts for the century—terms such as character, realism, illustration, sensation, the picturesque, and decadence. The Age of Paper might seem to be drawing to a close, but Picture World tracks nineteenth-century media effects into the present day, from the portrait albums of Facebook to the illusionistic otherworlds of 3D films.Less
Many visual media that we take for granted today were in fact invented in the nineteenth century. New technologies led to the creation of new media such as the illustrated newspaper, the cheap caricature cartoon, the affordable illustrated book, the portrait photograph, and the advertising poster. Though these objects might seem like throwaway ephemera, Picture World argues that they were crucial parts of nineteenth-century everyday life. Studying these ubiquitous pictures in fact helps us to revise common understandings of key aesthetic concepts for the century—terms such as character, realism, illustration, sensation, the picturesque, and decadence. The Age of Paper might seem to be drawing to a close, but Picture World tracks nineteenth-century media effects into the present day, from the portrait albums of Facebook to the illusionistic otherworlds of 3D films.
Vered Maimon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816694716
- eISBN:
- 9781452953526
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816694716.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Photography
The Photographic Imagination historicizes the conception of photography in the early nineteenth-century in England, in particular the works and texts by William Henry Fox Talbot, as part of a ...
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The Photographic Imagination historicizes the conception of photography in the early nineteenth-century in England, in particular the works and texts by William Henry Fox Talbot, as part of a historical shift in which new systems and methods of knowledge were constituted after the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for the study of nature. It locates the conditions for the conceptualization of photography within the legacy of British empiricism and the introduction of time into formations of knowledge. By addressing photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation, but also as a specific epistemological figure, it challenges the prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, it points to the material, formal and conceptual differences between the photographic image and the camera obscura image by analyzing the philosophical and aesthetic premises that were associated with early photography. It thus argues that the emphasis in early accounts on the removal of the “artist’s hand” in favor of “the pencil of nature,” did not mark a shift from manual to “mechanical” and more accurate or “objective” systems of representation. In the 1830s and 1840s the photographic image, unlike the camera obscura image, was neither seen as an emblem of mechanical copying nor of visual verisimilitude. In fact, its conception was symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological ground which informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.Less
The Photographic Imagination historicizes the conception of photography in the early nineteenth-century in England, in particular the works and texts by William Henry Fox Talbot, as part of a historical shift in which new systems and methods of knowledge were constituted after the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for the study of nature. It locates the conditions for the conceptualization of photography within the legacy of British empiricism and the introduction of time into formations of knowledge. By addressing photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation, but also as a specific epistemological figure, it challenges the prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, it points to the material, formal and conceptual differences between the photographic image and the camera obscura image by analyzing the philosophical and aesthetic premises that were associated with early photography. It thus argues that the emphasis in early accounts on the removal of the “artist’s hand” in favor of “the pencil of nature,” did not mark a shift from manual to “mechanical” and more accurate or “objective” systems of representation. In the 1830s and 1840s the photographic image, unlike the camera obscura image, was neither seen as an emblem of mechanical copying nor of visual verisimilitude. In fact, its conception was symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological ground which informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.
Simon Bainbridge
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198187585
- eISBN:
- 9780191718922
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187585.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter discusses Walter Scott's picturesque romance of war. Scott was the bestselling and most popular poet of the Napoleonic wars and his metrical romances played a crucial role in mediating ...
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This chapter discusses Walter Scott's picturesque romance of war. Scott was the bestselling and most popular poet of the Napoleonic wars and his metrical romances played a crucial role in mediating conflict to a nation at war. His phenomenally successful tales of ‘Border chivalry’ transformed the imagining of war, presenting it as heroic, shaped by the codes of romance, and framed by the conventions of the picturesque. Scott's poetry were about 16th-century wars but became popular during the Napoleonic wars. With his verse, the 18th-century emphasis on war's horrors gives way to the 19th-century stress on its glory. In addressing his readers as ‘Warriors’ in his last extended verse romance in 1814, Scott completed his remasculinisation of the reader and of poetry more generally contributing to the wartime revalidation of poetry as a manly pursuit for both writer and reader.Less
This chapter discusses Walter Scott's picturesque romance of war. Scott was the bestselling and most popular poet of the Napoleonic wars and his metrical romances played a crucial role in mediating conflict to a nation at war. His phenomenally successful tales of ‘Border chivalry’ transformed the imagining of war, presenting it as heroic, shaped by the codes of romance, and framed by the conventions of the picturesque. Scott's poetry were about 16th-century wars but became popular during the Napoleonic wars. With his verse, the 18th-century emphasis on war's horrors gives way to the 19th-century stress on its glory. In addressing his readers as ‘Warriors’ in his last extended verse romance in 1814, Scott completed his remasculinisation of the reader and of poetry more generally contributing to the wartime revalidation of poetry as a manly pursuit for both writer and reader.
Michael J. Franklin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199532001
- eISBN:
- 9780191730900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199532001.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Asian History, British and Irish Modern History
Jones chose to train as a barrister as a career in which intellectual merit might rival aristocratic privilege, facilitating independence. This chapter illustrates work and leisure as he rode the ...
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Jones chose to train as a barrister as a career in which intellectual merit might rival aristocratic privilege, facilitating independence. This chapter illustrates work and leisure as he rode the Oxford and Carmarthen circuits Lessons learned in the principality prepared him for his role as an imperial administrator. In Carmarthen, Haverfordwest and Cardigan he championed the rights of a peasantry oppressed by the arbitrary power exercised by Anglicized landlords, rack-renting squirearchy, and English-speaking monoglot magistrates and judges His letters provide a vivid picture of crime, punishment, and widely divergent social conditions within the principality. In his leisure hours ‘clubbable’ Jones initiated the society of the ‘Druids of the Tivy’ for the off-duty barristers whose fêtes champêtre, by the picturesque Teifi, rang to the extempore Romantic lyrics of pencerdd (chief Bard) Jones. Details of the causes argued by the celebrity barrister are interspersed with the lyrics composed by the ‘druidical ‘poet.Less
Jones chose to train as a barrister as a career in which intellectual merit might rival aristocratic privilege, facilitating independence. This chapter illustrates work and leisure as he rode the Oxford and Carmarthen circuits Lessons learned in the principality prepared him for his role as an imperial administrator. In Carmarthen, Haverfordwest and Cardigan he championed the rights of a peasantry oppressed by the arbitrary power exercised by Anglicized landlords, rack-renting squirearchy, and English-speaking monoglot magistrates and judges His letters provide a vivid picture of crime, punishment, and widely divergent social conditions within the principality. In his leisure hours ‘clubbable’ Jones initiated the society of the ‘Druids of the Tivy’ for the off-duty barristers whose fêtes champêtre, by the picturesque Teifi, rang to the extempore Romantic lyrics of pencerdd (chief Bard) Jones. Details of the causes argued by the celebrity barrister are interspersed with the lyrics composed by the ‘druidical ‘poet.
Katy Layton-Jones
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719099694
- eISBN:
- 9781526104038
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099694.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Chapter one begins with an account of the popular fascination with the changing form and appearance of urban Britain at the end of the eighteenth century before analysing the impact of this ...
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Chapter one begins with an account of the popular fascination with the changing form and appearance of urban Britain at the end of the eighteenth century before analysing the impact of this collective curiosity over the following century. It includes a chronology of the growth in demand for urban imagery that enabled the expansion of the topographical print, souvenir, and advertising markets. As well as acknowledging the well-rehearsed narrative of domestic tourism in the early nineteenth century, it explores the fashion for ‘taking in’ urban vistas and the impact that such as pastime had on defining criteria for urban evaluation. The evidence presented demonstrates how the pictorial traditions and visual vocabulary of topographical imagery informed the manner in which towns such as Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield were imagined and evaluated by visitors and remote readers alike, and how the resulting popular perceptions came to shape the physical environment itself.Less
Chapter one begins with an account of the popular fascination with the changing form and appearance of urban Britain at the end of the eighteenth century before analysing the impact of this collective curiosity over the following century. It includes a chronology of the growth in demand for urban imagery that enabled the expansion of the topographical print, souvenir, and advertising markets. As well as acknowledging the well-rehearsed narrative of domestic tourism in the early nineteenth century, it explores the fashion for ‘taking in’ urban vistas and the impact that such as pastime had on defining criteria for urban evaluation. The evidence presented demonstrates how the pictorial traditions and visual vocabulary of topographical imagery informed the manner in which towns such as Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield were imagined and evaluated by visitors and remote readers alike, and how the resulting popular perceptions came to shape the physical environment itself.
Timothy Trussell
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780813039886
- eISBN:
- 9780813043807
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813039886.003.0004
- Subject:
- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology
As tobacco cultivation swept across Virginia in the eighteenth century, the art of gardening took root among Virginia's elite. Thomas Jefferson drew on elements of gardens that he read about and ...
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As tobacco cultivation swept across Virginia in the eighteenth century, the art of gardening took root among Virginia's elite. Thomas Jefferson drew on elements of gardens that he read about and visited in France and England in shaping the Poplar Forest retreat grounds to express his intellectual and aesthetic preferences. He designed the north core landscape around features of English picturesque garden design. The south core drew upon the more formal rules of geometry and symmetry used in neoclassical gardens and reflected the influence of Palladio on the architecture of the house and dependencies. Drawing on documents and decades of landscape archaeology, this chapter considers ornamental landscapes as expressions of personal identity writ large. Jefferson's private retreat and grounds reinforced his notion of himself that he had developed through study, observation, and action.Less
As tobacco cultivation swept across Virginia in the eighteenth century, the art of gardening took root among Virginia's elite. Thomas Jefferson drew on elements of gardens that he read about and visited in France and England in shaping the Poplar Forest retreat grounds to express his intellectual and aesthetic preferences. He designed the north core landscape around features of English picturesque garden design. The south core drew upon the more formal rules of geometry and symmetry used in neoclassical gardens and reflected the influence of Palladio on the architecture of the house and dependencies. Drawing on documents and decades of landscape archaeology, this chapter considers ornamental landscapes as expressions of personal identity writ large. Jefferson's private retreat and grounds reinforced his notion of himself that he had developed through study, observation, and action.
Michelle Devereaux
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474446044
- eISBN:
- 9781474476652
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter elucidates fundamental principles of Romantic aesthetics—the concepts of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque—as they relate to Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenenbaums and ...
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This chapter elucidates fundamental principles of Romantic aesthetics—the concepts of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque—as they relate to Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Working from descriptions of the sublime and beautiful in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, it shows how both films’ aesthetic components create picturesque representations through mise-en-scène that combine beauty and sublimity in varying degrees. The Royal Tenenbaums aesthetic paradigm is termed the ‘painful picturesque’, a programme that systematically develops the middle-ground eighteenth-century picturesque ideal of perfected nature by creating shabby but pleasing, controlled yet chaotic visual systems in the urban pastoral environment of a fantasy New York City. The Life Aquatic accomplishes a similar aesthetic effect, although this time the film’s settings invoke the sublime more so than the beautiful, while resulting in a similar sense of picturesque anxiety. In the film potentially sublime locales are undercut by a commitment to creating pleasurable, non-threatening images that coincide with a deadpan comedic style, dubbed the ‘sentimental sublime’.Less
This chapter elucidates fundamental principles of Romantic aesthetics—the concepts of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque—as they relate to Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Working from descriptions of the sublime and beautiful in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, it shows how both films’ aesthetic components create picturesque representations through mise-en-scène that combine beauty and sublimity in varying degrees. The Royal Tenenbaums aesthetic paradigm is termed the ‘painful picturesque’, a programme that systematically develops the middle-ground eighteenth-century picturesque ideal of perfected nature by creating shabby but pleasing, controlled yet chaotic visual systems in the urban pastoral environment of a fantasy New York City. The Life Aquatic accomplishes a similar aesthetic effect, although this time the film’s settings invoke the sublime more so than the beautiful, while resulting in a similar sense of picturesque anxiety. In the film potentially sublime locales are undercut by a commitment to creating pleasurable, non-threatening images that coincide with a deadpan comedic style, dubbed the ‘sentimental sublime’.
Dean MacCannell
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520257825
- eISBN:
- 9780520948655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520257825.003.0007
- Subject:
- Anthropology, American and Canadian Cultural Anthropology
Landscapes seen as “picturesque” are said to engender feelings of peaceful calm or soothing solace. The role of landscape in the mediation of tourist/other is described. Picturesque landscapes are ...
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Landscapes seen as “picturesque” are said to engender feelings of peaceful calm or soothing solace. The role of landscape in the mediation of tourist/other is described. Picturesque landscapes are disproportionately found in “minor” places, that is, places forgotten or bypassed by big capital. Minor places now serve as “roots service stops” for postmodernites. The potential in the landscape is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for immigrants, nomads, refugees, the uprooted, and, perhaps someday, for tourists. The Cornish landscape art and the historical experience of mortal risk seem to exist as two parallel universes overlaid but closed to each other. Alfred Wallis transformed landscape and the memories it contains into place, a representational strategy Cornwall and its memories strongly resist. The tourist landscape is the teleotype of easily taken-for-granted agreement on everything thought to be “good” in nature and in human thought and action.Less
Landscapes seen as “picturesque” are said to engender feelings of peaceful calm or soothing solace. The role of landscape in the mediation of tourist/other is described. Picturesque landscapes are disproportionately found in “minor” places, that is, places forgotten or bypassed by big capital. Minor places now serve as “roots service stops” for postmodernites. The potential in the landscape is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for immigrants, nomads, refugees, the uprooted, and, perhaps someday, for tourists. The Cornish landscape art and the historical experience of mortal risk seem to exist as two parallel universes overlaid but closed to each other. Alfred Wallis transformed landscape and the memories it contains into place, a representational strategy Cornwall and its memories strongly resist. The tourist landscape is the teleotype of easily taken-for-granted agreement on everything thought to be “good” in nature and in human thought and action.
Christine Holbo
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190604547
- eISBN:
- 9780190604561
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190604547.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the ...
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U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. One marker of this was the postwar search for a “Great American Novel”—a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. The debate over what full representation would mean led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of “literature” for readers, writers, politics, and law. Legal Realisms examines the transformation of the idea of “realism” in literature and beyond in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender, and class structure of American society. The ideal of equality before the law conflicted with persistent inequality, and it was called into question by changing ideas about accurate representation and the value of cultural difference within the visual arts, philosophy, law, and political and moral theory. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée, and others, Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast. It shows how incomplete emancipation haunted the celebratory pursuit of a literature of national equality and explores the way novelists’ representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of society.Less
U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. One marker of this was the postwar search for a “Great American Novel”—a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. The debate over what full representation would mean led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of “literature” for readers, writers, politics, and law. Legal Realisms examines the transformation of the idea of “realism” in literature and beyond in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender, and class structure of American society. The ideal of equality before the law conflicted with persistent inequality, and it was called into question by changing ideas about accurate representation and the value of cultural difference within the visual arts, philosophy, law, and political and moral theory. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée, and others, Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast. It shows how incomplete emancipation haunted the celebratory pursuit of a literature of national equality and explores the way novelists’ representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of society.
Nigel Leask
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198850021
- eISBN:
- 9780191884498
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198850021.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Stepping Westward is the first book of its kind dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, ...
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Stepping Westward is the first book of its kind dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish and Gaelic identities. Attention is paid to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book’s core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to ’improve’ the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of ’home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ’romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance and emigration.Less
Stepping Westward is the first book of its kind dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish and Gaelic identities. Attention is paid to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book’s core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to ’improve’ the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of ’home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ’romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance and emigration.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the extent to which U.S. appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period experienced U.S. geographies through the lens of the picturesque, an expression of English ...
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This chapter examines the extent to which U.S. appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period experienced U.S. geographies through the lens of the picturesque, an expression of English romanticism associated with eighteenth-century aesthetes such as William Gilpin, Humphrey Repton, and Uvedale Price. Arguing that Emerson’s Nature (1836) engages an antebellum fascination with the picturesque while contesting some of its terms, the chapter takes up the picturesque’s emphasis upon unified, grand sweeps of nature as it would resonate with increasing anxieties over the literal, political division of U.S. lands.Less
This chapter examines the extent to which U.S. appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period experienced U.S. geographies through the lens of the picturesque, an expression of English romanticism associated with eighteenth-century aesthetes such as William Gilpin, Humphrey Repton, and Uvedale Price. Arguing that Emerson’s Nature (1836) engages an antebellum fascination with the picturesque while contesting some of its terms, the chapter takes up the picturesque’s emphasis upon unified, grand sweeps of nature as it would resonate with increasing anxieties over the literal, political division of U.S. lands.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for ...
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This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for reasons similar to their northeastern counterparts, the aesthetic also resonated in the slave-holding south for its conservative semiotics of labor, which suppressed viewer’s sympathetic responses to impoverished rural workers by idealizing them or keeping them in the distance. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832, 1851) registers a southern picturesque mode of the James River Valley of Upper Virginia, where indeed the euphemistic properties of the picturesque licenses an idealizing view of slavery. Interestingly, however, Kennedy’s novel not only indebts itself to the picturesque but also subverts its formulae in repeatedly violating its strictures on middle ground and distant space, drawing the reader into landscapes normally left unexplored in picturesque painting. In the process, the novel challenges the economies of slavery the southern picturesque would otherwise enjoin.Less
This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for reasons similar to their northeastern counterparts, the aesthetic also resonated in the slave-holding south for its conservative semiotics of labor, which suppressed viewer’s sympathetic responses to impoverished rural workers by idealizing them or keeping them in the distance. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832, 1851) registers a southern picturesque mode of the James River Valley of Upper Virginia, where indeed the euphemistic properties of the picturesque licenses an idealizing view of slavery. Interestingly, however, Kennedy’s novel not only indebts itself to the picturesque but also subverts its formulae in repeatedly violating its strictures on middle ground and distant space, drawing the reader into landscapes normally left unexplored in picturesque painting. In the process, the novel challenges the economies of slavery the southern picturesque would otherwise enjoin.
Jenni Calder
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647392
- eISBN:
- 9780748689279
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647392.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Scottish Studies
This chapter discusses the early depiction of parts of Scotland as barbaric obstacles to civilisation and stable government, and the changes in perception that came in the late eighteenth and ...
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This chapter discusses the early depiction of parts of Scotland as barbaric obstacles to civilisation and stable government, and the changes in perception that came in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Scotland’s wilderness became more accessible to travellers. These later responses were often ambivalent - Thomas Pennant and others were impressed by the landscape’s grandeur but appalled by its barrenness and the poverty of its inhabitants. The Enlightenment encouraged identification of potential for development while Ossian and Walter Scott nourished an appreciation of the picturesque, hugely boosted by Queen Victoria’s romantic enthusiasm for Highland landscapes. Similar contradictions underlie encounters with North America, and contemporary analogies between the Gaels and American natives were not uncommon. Scotland’s wilderness was seen as a training ground for North America, producing tough and resourceful pioneer material, but progress required that both the Highlands and the North American wilderness, along with their inhabitants, be tamed.Less
This chapter discusses the early depiction of parts of Scotland as barbaric obstacles to civilisation and stable government, and the changes in perception that came in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Scotland’s wilderness became more accessible to travellers. These later responses were often ambivalent - Thomas Pennant and others were impressed by the landscape’s grandeur but appalled by its barrenness and the poverty of its inhabitants. The Enlightenment encouraged identification of potential for development while Ossian and Walter Scott nourished an appreciation of the picturesque, hugely boosted by Queen Victoria’s romantic enthusiasm for Highland landscapes. Similar contradictions underlie encounters with North America, and contemporary analogies between the Gaels and American natives were not uncommon. Scotland’s wilderness was seen as a training ground for North America, producing tough and resourceful pioneer material, but progress required that both the Highlands and the North American wilderness, along with their inhabitants, be tamed.
