In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.
The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix serves as an introduction to one of the most important and most complex artists of the nineteenth century. Providing an overview of his life and career, this volume offers essays by leading authorities on the artist's pictorial practice, the stylistic range over classicism and Romanticism, his writings, both private diary notations and published articles, and his impact on modern aesthetics, among other topics. Designed to serve as an essential resource for students of French nineteenth-century art history, cultural history, and literature, The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix also provides a chronology of the artist's life, set into its political and cultural contexts, as well as a list of suggested further reading in the topic areas.
Viewing Europe from the Outside reexamines the narrative portrayal of cultural encounters between East and West in English and French Orientalist discourse. It focuses, in particular, on the eighteenth-century satirical travel account and the nineteenth-century literary travelogue. Through a close reading of five texts, it defines the monological, dialogical, and parodic uses of the Other as three forms of encounters that both provide structure for and participate in a self-reflective culture critique.
In this first study of art, law, and the legislator, Jonathan Ribner provides a revealing look at French art from 1789 to 1848, the period in which constitutional law was established in France. Drawing on several disciplines, he discusses how each of the early constitutional regimes in France used imagery suggesting the divine origin and sacred character of its laws. Primarily a study of art and politics, Broken Tablets discusses painting, sculpture, prints, and medals (many reproduced here for the first time), as well as contemporary literature, including the poetry of Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo. Ribner assesses the ways in which legislation imagery became an instrument of political propaganda, and he clearly illuminates the cult of the law as it became personalized under Napoleon, monarchist under the Restoration, and defensive under Louis-Phillipe.
This is the first collaborative international reading of irony as a major phenomenon in Romantic art and thought. The volume identifies key predecessor moments that excited Romantic authors and the emergence of a distinctly Romantic theory and practice of irony spreading to all literary genres. Not only the influential pioneer German, British, and French varieties, but also manifestations in northern, eastern, and southern parts of Europe as well as in North America, are considered. A set of concluding “syntheses” treat the shaping power of Romantic irony in narrative modes, music, the fine arts, and theater – innovations that will deeply influence Modernism. Thus the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach elaborated in the twenty chapters of Romantic Irony, as lead volume in the five-volume Romanticism series, establishes a significant new range for comparative literature studies in dealing with a complex literary movement. SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series’ total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism’s own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.
This renowned study follows the evolution of French painting from the Revolution through the Napoleonic era. Beginning with David's revolutionary classicism, Friedlaender scrutinizes the work of early-nineteenth-century artists against the background of their times. He reveals the baroque tendencies diffused into the art of Prudhon and the same predisposition, mixed with a strong realism, in the work of Géricault. Two distinct trends appear, deriving from Pussin and Rubens. The author follows the styles as they mature, and represents their consumation in two great masters—the refined and abstract classicism of Ingres and the baroque of Delacroix with its flamboyant colorism and exotic subjects.
