Color, the Visual Arts, and Representations of Otherness in the Victorian Novel
Color, the Visual Arts, and Representations of Otherness in the Victorian Novel

Author: Jessica Durgan

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation investigates the cultural connections made between race and color in works of fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian era, particularly how authors who are also artists invent fantastically colored characters who are purple, blue, red, and yellow to rewrite (and sometimes reclaim) difference in their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman in Charlotte Brontë̈'s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman from Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Yellow Face" (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911). These fictional texts serve as a point of access into the cultural meanings of color in the nineteenth century and are situated at the intersection of Victorian discourses on the visual arts and race science. The second half of the nineteenth century constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies helps to trigger the upheavals of the first avant-garde artistic movements and a reassessment of coloring's prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. By imagining what it would be like to change one's skin color, these artist-authors employ the aesthetic realm of color to explore the nature of human difference and alterity. In doing so, some of them are able to successfully formulate their own challenges to nineteenth-century racial discourse.

Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel
Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel

Author: Jessica Durgan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-12

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0429639597

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As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman Oscar Dubourg from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler Diggory Venn in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s "The Yellow Face" (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). While color has been historically viewed as suspicious and seductive in Western culture, the Victorian period constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies and the upheavals of the first avant-garde art movements result in an increase in coloring’s prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. These artist-authors draw on color’s traditional association with constructions of otherness to consider questions of identity and difference through the imaginative possibilities of color.

The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel
The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel

Author: Sophia Andres

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0814209742

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A provocative interdisciplinary study of the Victorian novel and Pre-Raphaelite art, this book offers a new understanding of Victorian novels through Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Concentrating on Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy and aligning each novelist with specific painters, this work interprets narrative redrawings of Pre-Raphaelite paintings within a range of cultural contexts as well as alongside recent theoretical work on gender. Letters, reviews, and journals convincingly reinforce the contentions about the novels and their connection with paintings. Featuring color reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, this book reveals the great achievement of Pre-Raphaelite art and its impact on the Victorian novel. Arguing for the direct relationship between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Victorian novel, this book fills a gap in the currently available literature devoted to the Victorian novel, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the connection of Pre-Raphaelite art to Victorian poetry. Visual readings of the Victorian novel channel the twenty-first-century readers' desire for the visual into the exploration of Pre-Raphaelite art in the Victorian novel, in the process offering fresh insights into the representation of gender in Victorian culture. Through a textual and a visual journey, this work reveals a new approach to the Victorian novel and Pre-Raphaelite art with profound implications for the study of both.

A Concise Dictionary of Comics
A Concise Dictionary of Comics

Author: Nancy Pedri

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1496838068

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Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, A Concise Dictionary of Comics guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics expertise. It provides them with a dictionary that doubles as a compendium of comics scholarship. A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions for each term. It includes twenty-five witty illustrations and pairs most defined terms with references to books, articles, book chapters, and other relevant critical sources. All references are dated and listed in an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of comics scholarship. Each term is also categorized according to type in an index of thematic groupings. This organization serves as a pedagogical aid for teachers and students learning about a specific facet of comics studies and as a research tool for scholars who are unfamiliar with a particular term but know what category it falls into. These features make A Concise Dictionary of Comics especially useful for critics, students, teachers, and researchers, and a vital reference to anyone else who wants to learn more about comics.

Orientalism
Orientalism

Author: Edward W. Said

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0804153868

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A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature
The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

Author: PH D Antonia Losano

Publisher:

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780814257364

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The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists. Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios--a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical--by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward--and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.

Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century
Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: AdrienneL. Childs

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1351573497

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Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ?negative? and ?positive? that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-si?e photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from G?cault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

The Victorians and Race
The Victorians and Race

Author: Shearer West

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Focusing on race, the aim of this work is to reflect, develop and extend interest in the 19th century - as the former epoch has come sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past, but the contours of our modernity.

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form
Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Author: Allison Morehead

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 027107938X

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This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.