Review of Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Dr. Alison Byerly\u27s concern is with the use in their fiction by four Victorian novelists of art works, performative as well as representational, experienced by the characters as well as metaphors within the larger narrative frame, works both real and invented - the Vatican\u27s antique Cleopatra/Ariadne in Middlemarch, for example, as well as the Agamemnon charade of Vanity Fair. Byerly sees this process as intimately bound up with \u27realism\u27 (the term is commonly offered to us in inverted commas) and with the self-consciousness of her chosen novelists: Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. This process, in turn, points up a paradox (one which is helpfully true) that while the rise of realism in the nineteenth century \u27shows how highly the Victorians valued art\u27s mimetic capacity\u27 (1), yet Victorian novels are \u27famously self-conscious about their status as artifacts\u27 (2). The novelists faced the question of how art can \u27evoke reality while acknowledging its difference from the real world\u27 and resolved it through their \u27obsessive analysis and display of art\u27s many guises\u27 (2). Byerly\u27s book attempts to account for the way in which Victorian novelists were able simultaneously \u27to deplore and exploit the idea of the aesthetic\u27 (3). At her conclusion, Byerly claims both that the artistic episodes of these novels \u27are not in fact separate episodes, but exist in the same ontological space as other events in the world of each novel\u27 (191) and that \u27the allusions to art that pervade the Victorian novel play a central role in constructing the indefinable ambience we call realism\u27 (184). Clearly, we are revisiting, often with interesting or engaging inflections, territory often visited before, and where the use of the unfamiliar (Thackeray\u27s \u27Going to See a Man Hanged\u27 and Flare and Zephyre, for example, both usefully deployed) offers new vistas. Yet is the concern with \u27realism\u27 one that impedes rather than promotes, since the perceived problem (that the representation of art in art will destroy the surface realism) is not one that troubles me in the way it does Byerly? The Victorian novelists are able both to delight in their \u27own artifice\u27 (Byerly\u27s phrase), as when Thackeray imagines Jones in his club reading the very number of Vanity Fair we are reading, and to revel in engaging the reader, emotionally and intellectually, with the created world, even while ironizing and doubling, admitting \u27both/and\u27 rather than \u27either/or\u27, just as Byerly herself notes Bronte does by ending lane Eyre not with Jane, but with St John Rivers. Is the self-consciousness of the Victorians so at odds with that realism and is their realism so new a thing? And did the Victorians really \u27deplore\u27 as well as \u27exploit\u27 the ideas of the aesthetic? If to \u27deplore\u27 is a reaction, say, to the cheapness of theatricality as against the depth of the dramatic (a distinction excellently made by Byerly, drawing upon an observation of Fanny Kemble\u27s), nonetheless the Victorians were also well versed in artifice: if they had not all read Jane Austen (or reading her, had disapproved as Charlotte Bronte did), yet they knew Fielding\u27s consciousness of audience and artifice: of low chapters that the polite reader may skip, of the implied reader, and the use of epic, whether comic in Joseph Andrews or complexly allusive to the Aeneid as in Amelia

Realism at Risk: The Representation of the Arts in Victorian Fiction

The dissertation argues that the preoccupation with art in the Victorian novel is, paradoxically, an articulation of the nineteenth-century movement towards realism. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy endanger their own claim to truth by repeatedly calling attention to the fictive status of painting, theater, and music. The characteristic Victorian practice of exposing the illusiveness of art should put the realism of the novel itself at risk; instead, the effect of openly invoking the problem of representation is ultimately to defuse it. Focusing on novels that incorporate a variety of arts, from sculpture to opera, the dissertation shows that it is the Victorian juxtaposition of multiple arts which enables the novelists to construct densely realistic fictional worlds out of such unlikely materials. Chapter One clarifies the Victorian use of artistic cross-referencing by contrasting it with the Romantic reliance on single-art analogies. The ascendance of music metaphors in Romantic literature reflects a growing interest in natural experience that is explicitly contrasted with the aesthetic experience represented by the picturesque. This opposition between nature and art is reconfigured by the Victorians into an opposition between the real or true and the false. Chapter Two suggests that Thackeray and Bronte collapse all distinctions between the arts, distinguishing only between true art and an illusive, theatrical mode. By freeing the arts from the positions they had long been assigned on the basis of their individual formal capabilities, Thackeray and Bronte allowed for the development of a new artistic hierarchy, one based on moral, rather than aesthetic, considerations. Chapter Three shows how Eliot\u27s association of different characters with specific arts produces a hierarchy in which visual art represents a detached and static simplification of reality, theatrical art is linked with deception, and music alone is capable of representing truth. Chapter Four demonstrates that for Hardy, aesthetic appreciation is a valid response to natural beauty, and concludes by suggesting that Hardy\u27s willingness to regard people and things as art anticipates the transition from Victorian realism to Aestheticism

Realism at Risk: The Representation of the Arts in Victorian Fiction

The dissertation argues that the preoccupation with art in the Victorian novel is, paradoxically, an articulation of the nineteenth-century movement towards realism. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy endanger their own claim to truth by repeatedly calling attention to the fictive status of painting, theater, and music. The characteristic Victorian practice of exposing the illusiveness of art should put the realism of the novel itself at risk; instead, the effect of openly invoking the problem of representation is ultimately to defuse it. Focusing on novels that incorporate a variety of arts, from sculpture to opera, the dissertation shows that it is the Victorian juxtaposition of multiple arts which enables the novelists to construct densely realistic fictional worlds out of such unlikely materials. Chapter One clarifies the Victorian use of artistic cross-referencing by contrasting it with the Romantic reliance on single-art analogies. The ascendance of music metaphors in Romantic literature reflects a growing interest in natural experience that is explicitly contrasted with the aesthetic experience represented by the picturesque. This opposition between nature and art is reconfigured by the Victorians into an opposition between the real or true and the false. Chapter Two suggests that Thackeray and Bronte collapse all distinctions between the arts, distinguishing only between true art and an illusive, theatrical mode. By freeing the arts from the positions they had long been assigned on the basis of their individual formal capabilities, Thackeray and Bronte allowed for the development of a new artistic hierarchy, one based on moral, rather than aesthetic, considerations. Chapter Three shows how Eliot\u27s association of different characters with specific arts produces a hierarchy in which visual art represents a detached and static simplification of reality, theatrical art is linked with deception, and music alone is capable of representing truth. Chapter Four demonstrates that for Hardy, aesthetic appreciation is a valid response to natural beauty, and concludes by suggesting that Hardy\u27s willingness to regard people and things as art anticipates the transition from Victorian realism to Aestheticism

Precarious creativity: Changing attitudes towards craft and creativity in the British independent television production sector

This article focuses on television workers’ attitudes towards craft and creative practice within the field of factual television production in the British independent television production sector (ITPS). Based on longitudinal qualitative research, it argues that a radical shift has occurred in the professional values that television producers’ associate with their creative work, by focusing on ethical and professional norms within factual television production. By considering the historical and contemporary discourse of ‘craft’ within this area of creative work, the article interrogates the nature of the changes that have taken place. The wider significance of these changes is also considered, through an engagement with theoretical concerns about the place of craft within late modernity (Sennett 2006), and with debates about the changes that have taken place within the political economy of independent television production. The article’s findings have contextual significance within contemporary debates about creative work (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010). Despite the celebratory policy rhetoric of the ‘creative industries’ (DCMS 1998), the transformed production environment within contemporary British television has had a detrimental effect on skills retention and development, as well as on the potential for creativity within the industry