"Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of the Victorian idyll, establishing its nature, lineaments, and significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British culture across media and genre. Chapters trace the Victorian idyll's emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century's close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories - subject, ecology, and form - this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods"--

Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of the Victorian idyll, establishing its nature, lineaments, and significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British culture across media and genre. Chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century’s close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories—subject, ecology, and form—this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods.

This is a new release of the original 1929 edition.

This study examines the origins, development and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910. It analyzes a variety of narrative modes, including gossip, anecdotes, and serialization, as well as the differences among genres (autobiographies, family biographies, biographical histories and dictionaries.) Julie Codell discerns the multiple, often conflicting identities that were ascribed to artists collectively, and as individuals. Her book serves as a timely sociological and cultural overview of the art world in Britain in the decades before World War I.

From country lanes to thatch roofs, a stroll through the enduring appeal of the nineteenth-century trope of rural English bliss. A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealized scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort. The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources and features some of the key makers of the “South Country” rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape—indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted “the very essence of England” itself. As A Sweet View makes clear, the countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.

Victorian narrative paintings offer a unique insight into the 19th century. The plight of women, the affects of the class system, and the onslaught of industry are all forced upon the attention of the viewer. Within each picture there is a story to uncover, either optimistic, educational, or tragic. Hugely popular in the Victorian period, the paintings tell much about how the Victorians viewed themselves and those whose "transgressive" practices threatened their respectability. An illustrated introduction decodes the conventions used in narrative painting, from literary and artistic allusions to the use of symbolism. The stories contained in works by William Holman Hunt, William Powell Frith, Richard Redgrave, John Everett Millais, and many others are uncovered in detailed examinations of their paintings.

Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender.