Examines how art was changed from aesthetic experience to consumer commodity during the nineteenth century, and discusses the changing social role of art

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism deals with the influence of the tale in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and America, and the development of literary medievalism at this time. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

From Aesthetes in Africa to the cultural history of the teapot, the essays in this collection contribute to scholarly debates across a wide range of disciplines. Addressing the question of whether "eclectic" relationships in Victorian decorative arts are actually self-conscious iconographic schemes or merely random juxtapositions of assorted objects, Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867-1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, argues that no firm demarcation exists between the two movements examined here. In the process, the contributors explore a wide variety of interiors in locations as diverse as London, Cornwall, New England, and Tangiers. Analyzing spaces public and private, sacred and secular, the volume poses several historiographic challenges. Drawing on a wide range of feminist and queer theories, the book questions the identification of nineteenth-century interiors as exclusively female or family spaces. The collection also addresses the complex and temporary character of interiors, and responds to the recent scholarly trend to return questions of feeling and embodied experience to the study of the decorative arts.

This 1987 collection of essays casts light on this and other major aspects Henry James' novel The American.