Few people who use the word 'Renaissance' today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a 'myth' or story constructed by writers to explain the past. In this innovative and wide-ranging study, J. B. Bullen traces the genesis of that myth back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seeds of the idea are to be found in Voltaire, but Dr Bullen shows how it was taken up by French art historians and Gothic revivalists as an important element in the acrimonious political and religious debates within French historiography. The book's main focus, however, is on English intellectual life and the ways in which writers like Pugin, Ruskin, Browning, and George Eliot took up the terms established by Hugo, Rio, and Michelet in France and adapted a reading of fifteenth-century Italy to suit the special conditions of Victorian England. Ultimately, in the work of Swinburne, Arnold, Pater, and Symonds the Renaissance became a key factor in relating ethics and, in its aesthetics and late nineteenth-century phase, the myth figures prominently in an important discussion about the relationship between power, authority, and individualism. The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing is a major contribution to the analysis of a neglected aspect of Victorian intellectual life and will be essential reading for all scholars and students of the nineteenth century.

Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images -- characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images. J. B. Bullen explores this fascinating link between the image and the idea in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, and demonstrates how Hardy approached his work from a particular "point of view" which not only determined the lighting, composition, and structure of his literary visual effects, but which also allowed him to express emotions and ideas in the direct, "vividly visible" fashion that is the hallmark of his greatest fiction.

Writing and Victorianism asks the fundamental question 'what is Victorianism?' and offers a number of answers taken from methods and approaches which have been developed over the last ten years. This collection of essays, written by both new and established scholars from Britain and the U.S.A, develops many of the themes of nineteenth-century studies which have lately come to the fore, touching upon issues such as drugs, class, power and gender. Some essays reflect the interaction of word and image in the nineteenth-century, and the notion of the city as spectacle; others look at Victorian science finding a connection between writing and the growth of psychology and psychiatry on the one hand and with the power of scientific materialism on the other. As well as key figures such as Dickens, Tennyson and Wilde, a host of new names are introduced including working-class writers attempting to define themselves and writers in the Periodical press who, once anonymous, exercised a great influence over Victorian politics, taste, and social ideals. From these observations there emerges a need for self-definition in Victorian writing. History, ancestry, and the past all play their part in figuring the present in the nineteenth-century, and many of these studies foreground the problem of literary, social, and psychological identity.

"This is a new and scholarly study of William Michael Rossetti's seance diary, which is a fascinating first-hand source for the Rossetti brothers in the 1860s and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the spiritualist world." (Jan Marsh) "As quirky and unsettling as the table-turnings it documents, this meticulously edited and annotated seance diary features guest-appearances from the spirits of John Polidori, Elizabeth Siddal and Gabriele Rossetti, among many notable others. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, Spiritualism, and the Victorian paranormal." (Dinah Roe, Reader in Nineteenth Century Literature, Oxford Brookes University) William Michael Rossetti's seance diary is a remarkable document in both the history of Pre-Raphaelitism and nineteenth-century spiritualism. In this previously unpublished manuscript, Rossetti meticulously recorded twenty seances between 1865 and 1868. The original motive was the death, in 1862, of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal. He felt a profound sense of guilt about her and began these seances to reassure himself that she was happy in the afterlife. Messages came from many spirits within the Pre-Raphaelite circle and provide an unprecedented record of spiritualist activity in the late nineteenth century. Questions and answers fill the pages of the diary, many of them communicating uncannily accurate information or details that could be known only to the participants. This book also includes another unpublished document showing spiritualism in action. It comprises a long letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti written in 1856 from the artist and spiritualist medium Anna Mary Howitt recounting her interactions with the spirit world and her (sometimes violent) experiences as she became aware of the extent of her psychic powers. Both sections of this book provide an original insight into the cult of spiritualism and throw considerable light on the interactions between members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and beyond.

The avant garde is designed to shock and the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes shocked their contemporaries by their representation of the human body. This interdisciplinary study shows how the critical reaction to the representation of the body in painting and poetry from the work of Millais to that of Rossetti, and from Morris to Burne-Jones, was conditioned by such late nineteenth-century anxieties as fear of cholera and hatred of Catholicism, fascination with the fallen woman, horror at the `shrieking sisterhood' of emancipated women, and even the terror of psycho-sexual diseases.

Continental Crosscurrents is a series of case studies reflecting British attitudes to continental art during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It stresses the way in which the British went to the continent in their search for origins or their pursuit of sources of purity and originality. This cult of the primitive took many forms; it involved a reassessment of medieval German and Italian art and offered new ways of interpreting Venetian painting; it opened up new readings of architectural history and the "discovery" of the Romanesque; it generated a debate about the value of returning to religious subjects in art and it raised the question of the relationship between modern art and Byzantine art in the early twentieth century.
J. B. Bullen's original study presents some exciting findings. Few critics have noticed how much in advance of his time was Coleridge's passion for medieval art; Ruskin's debt in the Stones of Venice to Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris has hardly been noted; and Browning's involvement with the debate on the morality of Christian art is explored more extensively than previously. Three chapters are devoted to the role of British criticism in identifying the Romanesque style in architecture and differentiating it from the Gothic. They trace the concept as it arose in criticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century; its employment in the remarkable buildings of Edmund Sharpe and Sara Losh and the way in which it reached a climax in Waterhouse's enigmatic choice of Romanesque for the Natural History Museum in London. The collection concludes with two continental episodes from the history of modernism. One is the explosive British reaction tothe primitivism of Gauguin; the other involves the identifying of one of the characters in D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love. Curious evidence suggests that the malevolent figure of Loerke was based on a German sculptor whom Lawrence met in Italy before the First World War.