Worldwide Pre Raphaelitism

Pre-Raphaelitism's influence during the long nineteenth century was far-reaching, affecting artistic and literary thought in places, media, and times far removed from its origins in 1848 London. Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism examines the movement's development beyond England, from the continental "immortals" glorified by the nascent Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to later reactions against and in sympathy with the ideals of the movement after it had ended. This collection of essays by art historians, literary critics, fashion historians, women's studies scholars, and independent researchers from around the world enhances our understanding of the global impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on the art-historical and literary developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Victorian England, with the country swept up in the Industrial Revolution, the Pre-Raphaelites, close to William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement, yearned for a return to bygone values. Wishing to revive the pure and noble forms of the Italian Renaissance, the major painters of the circle (such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt) favoured realism and biblical themes over the academicism of the time. This work, with its captivating text and rich illustrations, describes with enthusiasm this singular movement which notably inspired Art Nouveau and Symbolism.

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers a range of Pre-Raphaelite literary scholarship, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of Pre-Raphaelitism. The authors in this collection position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making, aiming to identify and explore the Pre-Raphaelites’ diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, gendered, and sacred. Each chapter examines how Pre-Raphaelitism takes up and explores modes of making and re-making identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even, time and space. Essays explore themes of formalist or prosodic approaches, expanded networks of literary and artistic influence within Pre-Raphaelitism, and critical legacies and responses to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and arts, codifying the methods, forms, and commonalties that constitute literary Pre-Raphaelitism.

This volume is the first comprehensive study of the influence of English Pre-Raphaelitism on Italian art and culture in the late nineteenth century. Analysis of the cultural relations between Italy and Britain has focused traditionally on the special place that Italy had in the British imagination, but the cultural and artistic exchanges between the two countries have been much misunderstood. This book aims to correct this imbalance by placing Pre-Rapahelitism in its European context. It explores the nature of its influence on Italy, how it was transmitted, and how it was manifested, by focusing on the role of Italian Anglophiles, the English communities in Florence and Rome, the writings of Gabriele D'Annunzio, and a number of Italian artists active in Tuscany and Rome. The works of Cellini, Ricci, Gioja, De Carolis, and Sartorio in particular fully demonstrate the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on the young Italian school of painting which found in the English movement an ideal link with its glorious past on which it could build a new artistic identity. These artists show that English Pre-Raphaelitism was one of the most powerful single influences on fin-de-siecle Italian culture.

United in their opposition to the artistic establishment, the Pre-Raphaelites were determined to paint their pictures with complete fidelity to nature, using pure and vibrant colours on a white background. This book charts the rise and continued influence of this movement.

My book traces the significant poetic and political contributions made by non-canonical women poets, situating women's poetry both in colonial Australian print culture and in wider imperial and transnational contexts. Women poets in colonial Australia have tended to be represented as marginal and isolated figures or absent. This study intervenes by demonstrating an alternative networked tradition of transnational feminist poetics and politics beyond and around emergent masculine nationalism, particularly within newspapers and periodical print culture. Without the inclusion of periodical literature, women’s poetry in Australia during the colonial period would appear to have been fairly limited. When periodical literature is taken into account, this picture is radically altered, and poets emerge as consistent contributors, often across a variety of newspapers and journals, who were well-known, influential and connected with political figures and literary circles. In examining this poetry in the original context of the newspapers and journals, the political intervention and the reception of that poetry is made much more apparent.

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.