The Victorian era is rightly associated with the industrial
revolution in Britain and the ascendancy of a materialist,
commercially-oriented middle class. The threat to spiritual values
was felt strongly in the realm of religion but also in the secular
realm of the arts and literature. This volume analyzes the drive
toward cultural transcendence in the lives and works of such
eminent Victorians as Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, the aesthetics
of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the romantic origins of anthropology.
The various modes of escape from the Victorian era helps illuminate
present concerns about culture and society. First published in
1970, Victorian Revolutionaries represents a major effort in the
intellectual rehabilitation of Victorian art and thought. Peckham's
readings of In Memoriam and Idylls of the King show Tennyson at
odds with Christianity except with the notion of the immortality of
the soul. The terror of meaninglessness that he discerns here is
echoed in the chapter on Carlyle who views human life as issuing
from mystery and proceeding in chaos, protected only by
self-deception. For Browning, the perceived lack of meaning or
purpose results in an existential poetics of the world as theater
and the individual as actor. Peckham's chapter on the
Pre-Raphaelites anticipates their later rehabilitation by arguing
that their work properly understood constitutes a challenge to the
institutional modernism of the late twentieth century just as they
had, in turn, challenged the academic values of the Royal Academy.
The West is once more living in a culturally critical period today.
Any help we can get in understanding how to deal with it is bound
to be of value. Not the particular strategies of these men, but the
general pattern of their search in social and anthropological
theory is probably the most useful thing they have to offer.
General
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