45 research outputs found
Dickens extra-illustrated: heads and scenes in monthly parts (The Case of Nicholas Nickleby)
As a practice that interleaves extraneous materials within the pages of a book, extra-illustration unbinds the volume form and undermines the autonomy of the literary and of the act of reading. I concentrate on Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and sets of extra-illustrations by Peter Palette (pseud, for Thomas Onwhyn) and Miss La Creevy (pseud, for Kenny Meadows). Taking advantage of the material and temporal aspects of serialization, these extra-illustrations rearticulate the act of reading in a way that emphasizes the place of Victorian literature in a culture of viewing and collecting
âA Gallery in the Mindâ? Hazlitt, Spenser, and the Old Masters
âAn old lady, to whom Pope one day read some passages out of Spenserâs âFaerie Queene,â
said that he had been entertaining her with a gallery of picturesâ. Published in Joseph
Spenceâs Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (1820), this scene of
reading reached a new public brought together by a new culture of Old Master paintings
shaped by the establishment of temporary exhibitions at the British Institution. Drawing on
Francis Haskellâs notion of the ephemeral museum, this paper explores William Hazlittâs
association of Spenser with the Old Masters in his Lecture on Chaucer and Spenser (1818)
and his essay on âPictures at Oxford and Blenheimâ, which was the last instalment of his
British Galleries of Art published in the London Magazine in 1823. Building on the work of
Jonathan Richardson, who had placed an intermedial art of memory at the centre of his
âscience of a connoisseurâ, Hazlitt advocated a practice of âreading with the eyes of a
connoisseurâ. Through the pages of the Faerie Queene Hazlitt imagined a new gallery of
painting, a âgallery of the mindâ that could be abstracted from the aristocratic world of old
master collections and the Spenserian productions of modern painters
Historic doubts, conjectures, and the wanderings of a principal curiosity: Henry VII in the fabric of Strawberry Hill
This article explores the inscriptions and material metamorphoses of Henry VII in Horace Walpoleâs âpaper fabricâ, a reversible world of writing, collecting, and book making. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Walpole celebrates the funerary monument of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano at Westminster Abbey. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768) conjecture and speculation become methodological prompts to unveil the textual and architectural discontinuities of history. Walpoleâs next historical experiment consists in placing a bust of Henry VII in the agonies of death in the Star Chamber at Strawberry Hill. The bustâs importance is captured by its reappearance propped on top of a frontispiece and its dissemination in other reproductions in extra-illustrated copies of Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford at Strawberry Hill (1784). A dramatic representation of the bust in John Carterâs extra-illustrated copy of Description, later engraved in his Specimens of the Ancient Sculpture and Painting now remaining in this Kingdom (1780-94), shows the alternative trajectories of Henry VII from Westminster Abbey to Strawberry Hill, from Walpoleâs cosmopolitan collection of curiosities to Carterâs paper collection of national gothic specimens
Modern Sibyls and sibylline media
The dynamic image of the Sibylâs flying leaves is at odds with the still life of painting, but her recalcitrant ministry offers a powerful allegory for the survival of writing as a âriddle at the paintingâs centreâ (Garrett Stewart), a medium whose mode of operation has been subtracted by its transposition in paint. This essay traces visual lines of transmission starting with Old Master paintings, and then turning to portraits, adaptations, and impersonations of modern sibyls in the Romantic period, focusing on Benjamin West, Angelica Kauffmann, Emma Hamiltonâs attitudes and Friedrich Rehbergâs outlines, and Elisabeth VigĂŠe Le Brun
In the cloud: Nineteenth-Century visions and experiments for the digital age
What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Calè and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive
Blake, Young, and the poetics of the composite page
This essay analyses William Blakeâs âcomposite artâ through a practice of illustration that staged the separation of text and illustration, tracing his successive experiments with Edward Youngâs Night Thoughts, from the extra-illustrated volumes of 537 watercolours to the illustrated edition published by Richard Edwards in 1797 and the recycling of proofs in Vala or The Four Zoas. The shifting relationship between letterpress and illustration in the extra-illustrated volume and the 1797 edition, and the function of proofs as units of composition, shed light on the archaeology of bookmaking and its impact on the composition of the manuscript
The reception of Blake in Italy
Apart from scant encyclopaedia entries, the first traces of Blake in Italy come through German Dante scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. After a private press publication of âTigreâ in 1906, the key translations of Blakeâs works are Edmondo Dodsworthâs Il matrimonio del cielo e dello inferno (1923), followed from the 1930s by the most influential translations by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, published in newspapers in 1930 and 1933, collected in Traduzioni in 1936 (with translations from St. J. Perse, Gongora, Essenin, Jean Paulhan), and continuing over a period of thirty years, culminating in Visioni, published in 1965 and regularly reprinted. While Ungaretti singled out the shorter poems to produce a hermetic Blake, translation of the later prophetic works was inaugurated by an anonymous translation of Jerusalem published in 1943 in a series entitled âBreviari Misticiâ. Libri profetici, translated by Roberto Sanesi, appeared in 1980. Another edition of Jerusalem, with a facsimile of copy E, was published with a translation by Marcello Pagnini in 1994. I quattro zoa: i tormenti dellâamore e della gelosia nella morte e nel giudizio finale di Albione, lâantico uomo, translated by drama therapist Salvo Pitruzzella was published in the series âI quaderni dellâAlmagestoâ in 2007. Blakeâs work has been studied by philosophers and psychologists, as well as scholars of literature and art history. Rewritings include a visionary biographical prose poem by Caterina Lelij (1938), radical left wing lawyer Corrado Costaâs cartoon essay Blake in Beulah, saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (1983), and Paolo Renostoâs musical compositions Loveâs Body (1974, winner of the âpremio dâItaliaâ) and Omaggio a Blake (1983), hosted in the new phonology studio of the Italian Broadcasting Corporation (RAI) run by Luciano Berio in the 1970s and 1980s
âA Bright Erroneous Dream": The Shelley Memorial and the body of the Poet
This article argues that Edward Onslow Fordâs Shelley Memorial at University College Oxford (inaugurated in 1893) played an important role in refashioning Shelleyâs corpus at the turn of the century, particularly by enabling political and homoerotic readings of his works, and contributed to a distinctive fin-de-siècle reception of the Romantic poet. The display and architectural setting of the Shelley Memorial activate Shelleyâs poetic Platonism by playing with the metamorphic possibilities of light and shadow. The sculptural medium thus generated new ways of reading Shelley just as it illuminates the aesthetics and politics of Victorian classicism and nineteenth-century attitudes to the cultural significance of the male poetic body
Poetics of the Bedroom Scene in Fuseli, Frankenstein, Film
This essay explores Henry Fuseliâs The Nightmare (1781), its intermedial modes of transmission, and the intermedial poetics and reading practices it generates. The sensational power of The Nightmare generates further commissions in the areas of dreams, the gothic and the supernatural. The striking composition and open-ended potential of Fuseliâs nocturnal interior make it a schema that helps define and disseminate works. Its intermedial circulation also defines the narrative possibilities and the visual construction of the death-bed scene in Shelleyâs Frankenstein, a scene often related to Fuseliâs picture mostly for its biographical import or its afterlife in filmic adaptations.Cet article sâintĂŠresse aux modes de transmission, Ă la poĂŠtique de lâintermĂŠdialitĂŠ et aux pratiques de lectures que Le Cauchemar de Henry Fuseli (1781) a gĂŠnĂŠrĂŠs. Les potentialitĂŠs de lecture relativement ouvertes qui caractĂŠrisent cette scène dâintĂŠrieur nocturne en font une reprĂŠsentation qui a contribuĂŠ Ă dĂŠfinir dâautres Ĺuvres. Cette circulation intermĂŠdiale engendrĂŠe par le tableau inflĂŠchit la construction visuelle de la scène de la mort dâElizabeth sur son lit, dĂŠcrite par Shelley dans Frankenstein. LâĹuvre de Fuseli apparaĂŽt comme une scène-clĂŠ non seulement dans le roman mais aussi dans ses transpositions filmiques.Calè Luisa. Poetics of the Bedroom Scene in Fuseli, Frankenstein, Film. In: Cahiers Charles V, n°48,2010. Circulation and Transfer of Key Scenes in Nineteenth-Century Literature. pp. 85-105
Spiritual form: Walter Pater's encounters with William Blake
The relationship between the arts was central to Paterâs literary criticism. His interest in the poet-painters Blake and Rossetti offers an ideal corpus for thinking about form within and across the arts. Although Pater never devoted a whole essay to Blake, his name surfaces in discussions about form and style, image and meaning, soul and mind, in which literature is defined within a classical and European aesthetic tradition. Artistic examples and analogies shape a comparative and complementary understanding of literature and art through exercises in appreciation and interartistic lines of cultural influence that present Blake and Hugo as the âtrue sonsâ of Michelangelo. This chapter traces Paterâs engagement with Blake through Swedenborg and Swinburne, and then focuses on Blakeâs function in Paterâs poetics. Paterâs explicit references to Blake bring to view his illustrations to Job and Robert Blairâs The Grave, revealing the role played by visual invention in his attempts to define the organic interfusion of form and matter in literary writing. In his essays on Demeter and Dionysus, he mentions Blake as a â âsurvivalâ from a different ageâ, who can articulate an aesthetic politics for the present through the experience of âspiritual formâ, a concept he attributes to Blake. Blake had used this formula satirically in the titles of his dystopian allegorical portraits of Pitt, Nelson, and Napoleon to denounce their political imposition as a satirical yoking of opposites. These paintings were exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Clubâs Blake retrospective when Pater developed his own idea of âspiritual formâ in 1876. In a strong act of misreading and revaluation, Pater repurposes the term to signal the utopian potential of an ancient embodied aesthetic to heal the separation between form and content and to restore the prelapsarian eternal body celebrated in Blakeâs prophetic writings. Comparison with Blakeâs discussion of Chaucer shows how both writers look to sculpture to develop an embodied ideal of the human form divine and to define how it might be achieved, restored, reformed through an embodied aesthetic. Engagement with Blake illuminates the inter-art dynamics of Paterâs critical practice, providing insight into the role of art criticism in developing his writing about literature. Paterâs Blake brings out a discipline of literary form that is shaped by a multisensorial aesthetic