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Presenting an inventive body of research that explores the
connections between urban movements, space, and visual
representation, this study offers the first sustained analysis of
the vital interrelationship between printed images and urban life
in early modern London. The study differs from all other books on
early modern British print culture in that it seeks out printed
forms that were active in shaping and negotiating the urban
milieu-prints that troubled categories of high and low culture,
images that emerged when the political became infused with the
creative, as well as prints that bear traces of the roles they
performed and the ways they were used in the city. It is
distinguished by its close and sustained readings of individual
prints, from the likes of such artists as Wenceslaus Hollar,
Francis Barlow, and William Faithorne; and this visual analysis is
complemented with a thorough examination of the dynamics of print
production as a commercial exchange that takes place within a wider
set of exchanges (of goods, people, ideas and money) across the
city and the nation. This study challenges scholars to re-imagine
the function of popular prints as a highly responsive form of
cultural production, capable not only of 'recording' events, spaces
and social actions, but profoundly shaping the way these entities
are conceived in the moment and also recast within cultural memory.
It offers historians of print culture and British art a
sophisticated and innovative model of how to mobilize rigorous
archival research in the service of a thoroughly historicized and
theorized analysis of visual representation and its relationship to
space and social identity.
Presenting an inventive body of research that explores the
connections between urban movements, space, and visual
representation, this study offers the first sustained analysis of
the vital interrelationship between printed images and urban life
in early modern London. The study differs from all other books on
early modern British print culture in that it seeks out printed
forms that were active in shaping and negotiating the urban
milieu-prints that troubled categories of high and low culture,
images that emerged when the political became infused with the
creative, as well as prints that bear traces of the roles they
performed and the ways they were used in the city. It is
distinguished by its close and sustained readings of individual
prints, from the likes of such artists as Wenceslaus Hollar,
Francis Barlow, and William Faithorne; and this visual analysis is
complemented with a thorough examination of the dynamics of print
production as a commercial exchange that takes place within a wider
set of exchanges (of goods, people, ideas and money) across the
city and the nation. This study challenges scholars to re-imagine
the function of popular prints as a highly responsive form of
cultural production, capable not only of 'recording' events, spaces
and social actions, but profoundly shaping the way these entities
are conceived in the moment and also recast within cultural memory.
It offers historians of print culture and British art a
sophisticated and innovative model of how to mobilize rigorous
archival research in the service of a thoroughly historicized and
theorized analysis of visual representation and its relationship to
space and social identity.
From Still Life to the Screen explores the print culture of
18th-century London, focusing on the correspondences between images
and consumer objects. In his lively and insightful text, Joseph
Monteyne considers such themes as the display of objects in still
lifes and markets, the connoisseur's fetishistic gaze, and the
fusion of body and ornament in satires of fashion. The desire for
goods emerged in tandem with modern notions of identity, in which
things were seen to mirror and symbolize the self. Prints,
particularly graphic satires by such artists as Matthew and Mary
Darly, James Gillray, William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and Paul
Sandby, were actively involved in this shift. Many of these images
play with the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate,
self and thing. They also reveal the recurring motif of image
display, whether on screens, by magic lanterns, or in "raree-shows"
and print-shop windows. The author links this motif to new
conceptions of the self, specifically through the penetration of
spectacle into everyday experience. Published for the Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art
In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a
crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament
to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert
paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form
of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid
bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique
in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires
which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world.
Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such
as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry
Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive
technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency. Joseph
Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age's
baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media's
weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly
illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the
fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important
sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective
discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in
British culture.
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