"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.

The practice of walking to a sacred space for personal and spiritual transformation has long held a place in the British imagination. Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination from the years 1790 to 1850. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated written and visual sources, Kathryn Barush develops the notion of the transfer of 'spirit' from sacred space to representation, and contends that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. Drawing on a rich range of material including paintings and drawings, manuscripts, letters, reliquaries, and architecture, the book offers an important contribution to scholarship in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, art history, and literature.

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Epoque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments - not just financial but also emotional and imaginative - in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

This volume presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of academic poster presentations, taking into consideration the text and visuals that posters display depending on the discipline within which they are created. As the academic poster is a multimodal genre, different modal aspects have been taken into consideration when analysing it, a fact that has somehow complicated the genre analysis conducted, but has also stimulated the research work involved and, in the end, provided interesting results. The analysis carried out here has highlighted significant cross-disciplinary differences in terms of word count, portrait/landscape orientation and layout of posters, as well as discipline and subdiscipline-specific patterns for what concerns the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources. The investigation has revealed what textual and visual metadiscourse resources are employed, where and why, and as a consequence, what textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be adopted by poster authors depending on the practices and expectations of their academic community.

The Doppelganger - the double, twin, mirror image or alter ego of someone else - is an ancient and universal theme that can be traced at least as far back as Greek and Roman mythology, but is particularly associated with two areas of study: psychology, and German literature and culture since the Romantic movement. Although German language literature has been a nexus for writing on the Doppelganger, there is a paucity of scholarly work treating a broader selection of cultural products from the German-speaking world. The essays in this volume explore the phenomenon of the double in multiple aspects of German visual culture, from traditional art forms like painting and classical ballet to more contemporary ones like film, photography and material culture, and even puppet theatre. New ways of understanding the Doppelganger emerge from analyses of various media and time periods, such as the theme of the double in a series of portraits by Egon Schiele, the doubling of silk by rayon in Weimar Germany and its implications for class distinctions in Germany, and the use of the x-ray as a form of double in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and Christoph Schlingensief's performance art.

Without question, the tache (blot, patch, stain) is a central and recurring motif in nineteenth-century modernist painting. Manet's and the Impressionists' rejection of academic finish produced a surface where the strokes of paint were presented directly, as patches or blots, then indirectly as legible signs. Cezanne, Seurat, and Signac painted exclusively with patches or dots. Through a series of close readings, this book looks at the tache as one of the most important features in nineteenth-century modernism. The tache is a potential meeting point between text and image and a pure trace of the artist's body. Even though each manifestation of tacheism generates its own specific cultural effects, this book represents the first time a scholar has looked at tacheism as a hidden continuum within modern art. With a methodological framework drawn from the semiotics of text and image, the author introduces a much-needed fine-tuning to the classic terms index, symbol, and icon. The concept of the tache as a 'crossing' of sign-types enables finer distinctions and observations than have been available thus far within the Peircean tradition. The 'sign-crossing' theory opens onto the whole terrain of interaction between visual art, art criticism, literature, philosophy, and psychology.

This collection of essays by musicologists and art historians explores the reciprocal influences between music and painting during the nineteenth century, a critical period of gestation when instrumental music was identified as the paradigmatic expressive art and theoretically aligned with painting in the formulation utpictura musica (as with music, so with painting). Under music's influence, painting approached the threshold of abstraction; concurrently many composers cultivated pictorial effects in their music. Individual essays address such themes as visualization in music, the literary vs. pictorial basis of the symphonic poem, musical pictorialism in painting and lithography, and the influence of Wagner on the visual arts. In these and other ways, both composers and painters actively participated in interarts discourses in seeking to redefine the very identity and aims of their art. Also includes 17 musical examples.

This book provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date. The development of contemporary practice, theory and criticism is understood as integral to the concomitant construction of Palestinian national identities. In particular the book explores the intricate relationship between art and nationalism in which the idea of origin plays an important and problematic role. The book deconstructs the existing narratives of the history of Palestinian art, which search for its origins in the 19th century, and argues that Palestinian contemporary art demonstrates pluralistic, politically and philosophically complex attitudes towards identity and nation that confound familiar narratives of origin and belonging. The book builds upon theories of art, nationalism and post-colonialism particularly in relation to the themes of fragmentation and dispersal. It takes the Arabic word for Diaspora Shatat (literally broken apart) as a central concern in contemporary understanding of Palestinian culture and develops it, along with Edward Said's paradoxical formula of a 'coherence of dispersal' as the organising concept of the book. This aspect of contemporary Palestinian art is peculiarly suited to the conditions produced by the globalisation of art and we show how Palestinian artists, despite not having a state, have developed an international profile.

The formative influences of Paris and France on the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) cannot be underestimated. While the years Moore spent in Paris in the 1870s were seminal for his artistic awakening and development, the associations and friendships he formed in French literary and artistic circles exerted an enduring influence on his creative career. Moore maintained close ties with France throughout his life and his numerous contacts extended to social, musical and cultural spheres. He introduced the Impressionists to a British audience and his importation of French literary innovation into the English novel was remarkable. Exploring Moore's early years in Paris and his ongoing engagement with the experimental modernity of his French models, these essays offer new insights into this cosmopolitan writer's work. Moore emerges as a turn-of-the-century European artist whose eclectic writings reflect the complex evolution of literature from Naturalism to Modernism through Symbolism and Decadence.

Sung closely examines William Blake's extant engraved copper plates and arrives at a new interpretation of his working process. Sung suggests that Blake revised and corrected his work more than was previously thought. This belies the Romantic ideal that the acts of conception and execution are simultaneous in the creative process.

This revolutionary interdisciplinary study argues that Monet's artistic practices and choices were the direct result of his political stance as a nineteenth-century libre penseur, a position characterized by radical republicanism, a progressive social agenda, and fierce anticlericalism. His efforts to create a style reflecting his personal political code led him to produce paintings proclaimed by like-minded free thinkers as "a science being constantly perfected" (Gustave Geffroy), that is, emphasizing only observable phenomena in the immediate present through scrupulous, insistent on-site observation, capturing the raw data of sensations and sensory experience, and purporting to record a world free of embedded meaning. Darwin's world similarly comes with no prepackaged reassurance of humankind's privileged place in it; it is instead a space in which all varieties of organisms and species compete for limited resources in a struggle for survival. The Darwinian model of nature appears to have influenced Monet's artistic production increasingly as his style evolved over several decades. In opposition to post-Renaissance art that privileged the human presence in both representation and the viewing act, Monet's later paintings create a sense of virtual and visual equality among all observable phenomena. The human - and the viewer, by extension - is thus represented as neither separate from nature as a disengaged observer nor superior to it but rather co-equal with all other organic life forms surrounding it. This approach, while echoing Darwin's admiration of nature and its laws, also reminds humankind of its own fragility and the hard choices it must make to avoid extinction.

This book explores how popular photography influenced the representation of travel in Britain in the period from the Kodak-led emergence of compact cameras in 1888, to 1939. The book examines the implications of people's increasing familiarity with the language and possibilities of photography on the representation of travel as educational concerns gave way to commercial imperatives. Sara Dominici takes as a touchstone the first fifty years of activity of the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA), a London-based philanthropic-turned-commercial travel firm. As the book reveals, the relationship between popular photography and travel marketing was shaped by the different desires and expectations that consumers and institutions bestowed on photography: this was the struggle for the interpretation of the travel image.

Mining various archives and newspaper repositories, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism provides the first full-length study of a remarkable woman and heretofore neglected art critic. Pennell, a prolific 'New Art Critic', helped formulate and develop formalist methodology in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, which she applied to her mostly anonymous or pseudonymous reviews published in numerous American and British newspapers and periodicals between 1883 and 1923. A bibliography of her art criticism is included as an appendix. In addition to advocating an advanced way in which to view art, Pennell used her platform to promote the work of 'new' artists, including Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, which had only recently been introduced to British audiences. In particular, Pennell championed the work of James McNeill Whistler for whom she, along with her husband, the artist Joseph Pennell, wrote a biography. Examination of her contributions to the late Victorian art world also highlights the pivotal role of criticism in the production and consumption of art in general, a point which is often ignored.

"Ut pictura poesis", Horace said, but through the two millennia in which "the sister arts" have been compared, little has been said about the nature of sight itself. What we see in "our mind's eye" as we read has not been explored, though by following the visual prompts in texts, one can anatomize the process of visualization. The Poetics of Sight analyses the role of sight in memory, dream and popular culture and demonstrates the structure of a complex sight within the metaphors of Shakespeare, Pope and Dickens; and within the visual metaphors of Picasso, Magritte and Bacon. This book explores the difference between the great and the failed works of the supreme poet-painter, William Blake, and tracks the migrations of the Satiric muse between verbal mockery and scabrous images in Persius, Pope, Gillray and Gogol. It records the rise, and partial decline, of the vividly "seen" novel in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust and Hardy. The key concept throughout this book is visual metaphor, which in the twentieth century acquired overarching importance: in art from Picasso to Kapoor, in poetry from Eliot to Hughes, in aesthetics from Pound to Derrida. The book closes with a far-reaching definition of visual metaphor and with the great visual metaphor of the human body.

Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.

First published in 1965, Mannerism is the rediscovery and revaluation of Mannerism, that long misjudged artistic style which came into its own during the crisis of the Renaissance. Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstract Art prepared the ground for a new understanding of Mannerism, and Dr. Hauser shows how this revaluation signifies an even deeper caesura in intellectual history than the crisis of the Renaissance itself in which Mannerism arose. These propositions however, only touch on the problem which is exhaustively treated by Hauser in all its historical and thematical variations. The author does not confine himself to the observation of development from the point of view of the history of art. In Part One he considers the emergence of the scientific worldview during the Renaissance, the economic and social revolution, religious movements and political ideas, the problem of alienation, and narcissism as keys to the understanding of Mannerism. Part Two, which deals with the history of Mannerism both in Italy and abroad, gives not only remarkable analyses of works of art with the aid of 322 reproductions, but also considers leading representatives of the literature of the Mannerism in Italy, Spain, France, and England. Again, in Part Three, parallel and connecting lines are drawn between art and literature to make the rules of form and the contents clearly recognisable. The book will be of interest to students of art history and literature.

Artists, scientists and the wider public of the Victorian era all seem to have shared a common interest in the myth of the Briar Rose and its contemporary implications, from the Pre-Raphaelites and late Victorian aesthetes to the fascinated crowds who visited Ellen Sadler, the real-life 'Sleeping Maid' who is reported to have slept from 1871 to 1880. The figure of the beautiful reclining female sleeper is a recurring theme in the Victorian imagination, invoking visual, literary and erotic connotations that contribute to a complex range of readings involving aesthetics, gender definitions and contemporary medical opinion. This book compiles and examines a corpus of Sleeping Beauties drawn from Victorian medical reports, literature and the arts and explores the significance of the enduring revival of the myth.

Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-siecle culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects lesser known critics, practitioners, and curators from obscurity, while also discussing the textile interests of better known figures, notably Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. Spanning the 50-year life of the Dual Monarchy, this study uncovers new territory in the history of art history, insists on the crucial place of women within modernism, and broadens the cultural history of Habsburg Central Europe by revealing the complex relationships among art history, women, and Austria-Hungary. Rebecca Houze surveys a wide range of materials, from craft and folk art to industrial design, and includes overlooked sources-from fashion magazines to World's Fair maps, from exhibition catalogues to museum lectures, from feminist journals to ethnographic collections. Restoring women to their place at the intersection of intellectual and artistic debates of the time, this book weaves together discourses of the academic, scientific, and commercial design communities with middle-class life as expressed through popular culture.

Defining Decadence The legacy of Gustav Klimt A century after his death, Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) still startles with his unabashed eroticism, dazzling surfaces, and artistic experimentation. This monograph gathers all of Klimt's major works alongside authoritative art historical commentary and privileged access to the artist's archive with some 179 letters, cards, writings, and other documents. With top quality illustration, including new photography of the celebrated Stoclet Frieze, the book follows Klimt through his prominent role in the Secessionist movement of 1897, his candid rendering of the female body, and his lustrous "golden phase" when gold leaf brought a shimmering tone and texture to such beloved works as The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also known as The Woman in Gold. Through luminous spreads and carefully curated details, the monograph traces the repertoire of Japanese, Byzantine, and allegorical stimuli that informed Klimt's flattened perspectives, his symbolic vocabulary, and his mosaic-like textures. Drawing upon contemporary critics and voices, the book also examines the art world's polarized reception to Klimt's pictures as much as his own stylistic trajectory. From his landscape painting to erotic works to the controversial ceiling for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, we see how Klimt's admixture of tradition and daring divided the press and public, becried by some as a pornographer, hailed by others as a modern maestro.

By the 1850s, the expansion of printing and distribution technologies provided writers with more readers and literary outlets than ever before, while the ever-changing political contexts occasioned by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 brought about differing degrees of political, social, and literary censure and pressure. Seth Whidden examines crises of literary authority in nineteenth-century French literature, both in response to the attempts of the Second Empire (1852-1870) to restore the unquestioned imperial authority that had been established by Napoleon I and in the aftermath of the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. In each of his chapters, Whidden offers a representative case study highlighting one of several phenomena-literary collaboration, parody, destabilized poetic form, the substitution of one poetic or narrative voice with that of the man-that enabled challenges to the traditional status of the writer and, by extension, the political authority that it reflected. Whidden focuses on the play Le Supplice d'une femme (1865); the Cercle Zutiste, a group of writers, musicians, and artists who met regularly in the fall of 1871, only months after the fall of the Second Empire; Arthur Rimbaud's Commune-era poems; and Jules Verne's 1851 'Un voyage en ballon,' later reprinted as 'Un drame dans les airs' in 1874. Whidden concludes with a futuristic look at authority and auctority as it pertains to midcentury writers taking stock of the weakened authority still possible in a post-Second Empire France and envisioning what kind of auctority is still to come.

For much of the nineteenth century, King Alfred was as important as King Arthur in the British popular imagination. A pervasive cult of the King developed which included the erection of at least four public statues, the completion of more than twenty-five paintings, and the publication of over a hundred texts, by authors ranging from Wordsworth to minor women writers. By 1852, J.A. Froude could describe Alfred's life as 'the favourite story in English nurseries'; in 1901, a national holiday marked the thousandth anniversary of his death, organised by a committee including Edward Burne Jones, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hughes. The book examines the ways in which Alfred was rewritten by nineteenth-century authors and artists, and asks how beliefs about the Saxon king's reign and achievements related to nineteenth-century ideals about leadership, law, religion, commerce, education and the Empire. The book concludes by addressing the most interesting enigma in Alfred's reception history: why is the king no longer 'England's darling'? A fascinating study that will be enjoyed by scholars of history, cultural history, literature and art history. -- .

Challenging distinctions between fine and decorative art, this book begins with a critique of the Rodin scholarship, to establish how the selective study of his oeuvre has limited our understanding of French nineteenth-century sculpture. The book's central argument is that we need to include the decorative in the study of sculpture, in order to present a more accurate and comprehensive account of the practice and profession of sculpture in this period. Drawing on new archival sources, sculptors and objects, this is the first sustained study of how and why French sculptors collaborated with state and private luxury goods manufacturers between 1848 and 1895. Organised chronologically, the book identifies three historically-situated frameworks, through which sculptors attempted to validate themselves and their work in relation to industry: industrial art, decorative art and objet d'art. Detailed readings are offered of sculptors who operated within and outside the Salon, including Sevin, Cheret, Carrier-Belleuse and Rodin; and of diverse objects and materials, from Sevres vases, to pewter plates by Desbois, and furniture by Barbedienne and Carabin. By contesting the false separation of art from industry, Claire Jones's study restores the importance of the sculptor-manufacturer relationship, and of the decorative, to the history of sculpture.

Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art argues for the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism as a means of examining the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary moving image art forms. The volume comprises six chapters divided into two sections. The first section, Part I, illustrates the key concepts in Bakhtin's multifaceted dialogism and develops these ideas in relation to moving image art. The main focus of this first part is the proposal of what the author terms dialogic materialism, which builds upon the Marxism inherent in Bakhtin, examining the material processes of cultural exchange with a particular emphasis on multi-perspective subjective relations. Part II consists of case studies that apply dialogic materialism to the moving image artwork of three artists: Stan Douglas, Jamelie Hassan and Chris Marker. Applying Bakhtinian theory to the field of the visual arts provides a means of examining the fundamentally dialogic nature of moving image art making and viewing, a perspective that is not fully developed within the existing literature.

Beyond the Frame rewrites the history of Victorian art to explore the relationships between feminism and visual culture in a period of heady excitement and political struggle. Artists were caught up in campaigns for women's enfranchisement, education and paid work, and many were drawn into controversies about sexuality. This richly documented and compelling study considers painting, sculpture, prints, photography, embroidery and comic drawings as well as major styles such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Neo-Classicism and Orientalism. Drawing on critical theory and post-colonial studies to analyse the links between visual media, modernity and imperialism, Deborah Cherry argues that visual culture and feminism were intimately connected to the relations of power.

Northern Ireland is now generally regarded to be a post-conflict region since the official end to three decades of violence in 1998. However, given some of the stipulations of the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, including the early release of politically motivated prisoners from jail, society in Northern Ireland remains in a state of flux, uncertainty and disagreement. This book presents four thematic studies revolving around the issues of imprisonment, surveillance, traumatic recall and myth-making in Northern Ireland. These studies examine the different ways in which artists and filmmakers are experimenting with film aesthetics and new media technologies to represent, re-present and invite engagement with the underlying anxieties that continue to trouble post-Agreement society. In doing so, the author argues for a reassessment of the critical analysis of film's convergence with other forms of visual art. Ultimately, the volume assesses the usefulness of such an approach in examining how artists and filmmakers experiment with diverse forms that open up space for discussion of the hidden and marginalized concerns in Northern Ireland's new, 'shared' society. This book was the winner of the 2012 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Film Studies.