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This article explores the concept of the arlequin, the plate of used food collected piecemeal from the tables of the rich to sell to the poor, as it was popularized by Eugène Sue in 1842 in his blockbuster novel Les Mystères de Paris. I show how this alimentary genre functions in this text not only to reflect a socioeconomic reality of the nineteenthcentury politics of eating, but also to introduce a budding aesthetic principle. The harlequin meal, composed of bits and pieces of various origins reassembled as a patchwork whole, inaugurates in Sue's novel a reappearing pattern that comes to characterize not only food but also bodies, clothing, décor, narrative form, and modes of attention and belief. I argue that the aesthetics of patchwork and collage extend as well to Sue's selffashioning as a political and moral opportunist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which the author discusses the depiction of texture in early 19th century photography, and mentions aesthetic theories of the daguerreotype versus the calotype, realism in art, and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot. Authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Uvedale Price, and Stephen Kern are cited, and artist William Dyce, fossil photography, and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron are also mentioned.

Nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt's attention to the complex interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism deepens our understanding of "romantic" rhetoric as reflexive and politically engaged. In sketches of orators and authors, Hazlitt criticizes their moribund deployments of classical rhetoric and its damaging consequences on British parliamentary politics, literature, and society. However, he also reworks classical rhetorical exercises and revives their civic potential in his dynamic prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the design debate in the printed-textile industry of the nineteenth century through an examination of textile samples, focusing on two key aspects: the need for design education and the development of diverging tastes between the upper and working-classes, and the effect of mechanization on design quality. This debate has dominated the historiography of printed textiles, yet is by no means exclusive to the textile industry. The aim of this article is not to assess the design quality of printed textiles produced in the North-West of England for the domestic market during the nineteenth century but to see the discussion of design quality in context and demonstrate how nineteenth-century ideas of design quality and taste were perpetuated throughout the twentieth century. Using the textile designs of Edmund Potter & Co. and Samuel Matley & Son found in the Board of Trade registers as a lens through which to unpack these issues, this article illustrates the value of examining the material evidence in relation to the design debate in the printed textile industry of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, yet these categories occupy only a marginal position in our present theories of genre. The terms of aesthetic judgment tend to fall out when we tally historical genres' discursive conventions and map their formal and thematic contours. In contrast, Victorian literary criticism's dependence on the language of feeling, not only in describing individual works but also in shaping generic taxonomies, provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which the seemingly irreducible particularities of aesthetic experience meet the generalizing force of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the Kelmscott editions of William Morris's late prose romances in reference to late-nineteenth-century typographical discourses. It identifies on the surface of the Kelmscott works a previously undisclosed record of print craftsmanship: a coordinated effort by Morris and his print workers to prevent textually encoded forms of distraction from accruing on the printed page. In so doing, it engages with past scholarship that has traced the politics of the Kelmscott book to its utopian methods of print production or to its idealized, textually implicit modes of aesthetic perception. Offering a new way of appreciating this politics, it considers the books' coordinated efforts to eliminate distractions as an organized resistance to the misguided technoprogressive logic informing modern print practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Études Françaises is the property of Presses de l'Universite de Montreal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Estudios de Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines picturesque aesthetics in nineteenth-century American realism as an expression of unease about middle-class life and as a manifestation of liberal guilt. Previous scholarship on the picturesque in American literature sees it as the failure of middle-class writers to represent urban poverty. I demonstrate the historical association of the picturesque with the formation of the middle class and argue that, since the eighteenth century, picturesque aesthetics have played a significant role in discourse about class relations. Through a reading of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes, I examine the picturesque as a means of addressing the ethical dilemmas of liberal humanists, whose compassion for the poor is undermined by a sense of its ineffectuality. Picturesque aesthetics are culturally significant today, suggesting a need to examine their social and ethical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mirza Gholamreza's status in Persian calligraphy and the artistic quality of his works is well acknowledged both in Iran and abroad. Many of the calligraphic pieces of Mirza Gholamreza (d. 1887) are close in appearance to siahmashq and on the surface can hardly be distinguished from ordinary calligraphic studies, so much so that some critics have come to call him “the siahmashq nevis.” This article is an attempt, to investigate the aesthetics of Mirza Gholamreza's calligraphic art with reference to these so-called siahmashq works. By analyzing some of these works it will be shown that they are not siahmashq, i.e. calligraphic exercises, in the ordinary sense. Far from it, these pieces are perfect examples of high-art, demonstrating Mirza Gholamreza's full understanding as well as ability to use intrinsic plastic features of the nast'aliq form. Mirza's work is therefore the forerunner of what, more than a century later, became a major strain in modern Iranian painting known as naqqashi-khat (script-painting). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Self-emancipated author, activist and philosopher turned art historian, Frederick Douglass spent a lifetime visualizing back to a white dominant schema intent on trading in racist grotesques of socially determinist and politically reductive contortions of black bodies and souls. Across his photographic and fine-art portraits, he endorsed a revisionist aesthetic theory and carved out an alternative iconographic space within which to expose, debunk and demythologize the racist claim that “Negroes look all like.” Douglass's visual aesthetic took as its starting point the formal, political and ideological importance of representing black subjects as psychologically complex individuals rather than as generic types. At the heart of Douglass's theory of portraiture was his conviction that all likenesses of African American subjects must do justice to “the face of the fugitive slave” by conveying the “inner” via the “outer man,” and thereby privilege emotional depth rather than physical surface in order to extrapolate a full gamut of lived realities otherwise annihilated out of existence. Douglass worked extensively with the signifying possibilities of his own physiognomy as a representative test case by which to bear witness to the interior complexities of black subjects missing from, or remaining fugitives at large within, white artists' surface-only renderings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at how aesthetic concerns inflected the dynamic of imperial relations during the 1857 Indian Uprising and its aftermath. The invention of photography inaugurated a period in which aesthetic imperatives increasingly came to structure the engagement of colonial bodies with the traumas of warfare in British India. The formal conventions of image-making practices were not consigned to a discreet virtual sphere; they were channelled into the contested terrains of the subcontinent through the poses that figures were striking for the camera. I trace how one pictorial convention – picturesquestaffage– had the capacity to engender politically and psychologically disruptive tableaus on the contested terrains of empire, as colonial photographers arranged for Indian figures to pose on landscapes that were marked by disturbing wartime violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although in recent years work some academic work has been undertaken about the use of colour, particularly blue, green and yellow, in Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism, little attention has been paid to the significance of the use of white in art, design and literature. Using as its starting point the notion of the Aesthetic or Artistic interior both as designed space and also as the interior self of the Aesthete formed though sensory experience, this article will utilize sources in art, design and literature to explore the complex meanings and symbolism of the colour white in art and design, as well as the relationship between design practice and ideas of artistic and Aesthetic selfhood. I contend that in employing the seemingly blank walls, canvases and draperies of whiteness, artists, writers and designers sought to create surfaces, spaces and images that could, and did, refer to very specific concepts of culture and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Peirce claimed that he was not well acquainted with aesthetics, he always was interested in that field. In spite of the fact that Peirce did not develop the issue in depth, aesthetics is located in his general framework as the foundation for the other normative sciences. Perhaps the trips through Europe and the contemplation of so many works of art and of historic places left in his memory the impressions that are at the basis of the importance that Peirce would assign to art and aesthetics in his later years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the work "Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik" (known as "Hegel's Aesthetics in English) by German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The author is particularly interested in understanding Hegel's appreciation of classical Greek civilization, especially sculpture, and its purported influence on German civilization. Topics discussed include the question of perfection, originality and mimicry, and Hegel's engagement with other German scholars of his time, particularly Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

The article discusses the performance of variety shows, blackface minstrelsy, and social aesthetics during the encampment of Confederate troops in Virginia, particularly in Orange County, Virginia, and Culpeper County, Virginia, during the winter of 1863 and 1864. It examines the impact of music and theatrical shows on the morale and identity of soldiers, the creation of military communities adjacent to preexisting towns, and war-related material and social commentary in the shows.

In this paper, I treat the question of the meta-axiological standing of Nietzsche's own values, in the service of which he criticizes morality. Does Nietzsche, I ask, regard his perfectionistic valorization of human excellence and cultural flourishing over other ideals to have genuine evaluative standing, in the sense of being correct, or at least adequate to a matter-of-fact? My goal in this paper is modest, but important: it is not to attribute to Nietzsche some sophisticated meta-axiological view, because I am doubtful that he has one. It is, however, to show that Nietzsche's texts do not necessitate the sceptical meta-axiological positions that have been attributed to him in the recent secondary literature. And it is thereby to suggest that we need not give up on the idea that Nietzsche takes the values he champions to have genuine evaluative standing – not because he has some sophisticated realist theory to this effect, but in a more philosophically unreflective way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented concerning U.S. showman and businessman P.T. Barnum and American literary modernism. The article discusses what the author calls the emerging visual culture in the U.S. at the conclusion of the 19th century, the concepts of spectacle and attention, and the urban culture of the U.S. at the end of the 19th century. The article also examines the relationship between popular entertainment and literary aesthetics.

Copyright of Studies on Art & Architecture / Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi is the property of Estonian Society of Art Historians and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the 1830s, Pennsylvania's Main Line of Public Works was at the cutting edge of the transportation revolution. Travelers embraced the speed and convenience of the line, but struggled to articulate the aesthetic experience of new forms of travel. This article uses the narratives of John Alonzo Clark, a Philadelphia minister, to explore the ways in which Pennsylvania travelers applied existing categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque to innovative technological experiences. Clark and travelers like him found that mechanized transportation on the Main Line of Public Works heightened their experience of the landscape and distilled the older categories to their essence. Far from perceiving a tension between modern technology and landscape appreciation, these travelers found that together the two created novel and pleasurable aesthetic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers for periodical magazines and reviews in the late Romantic period became increasingly aware of the role that such publications played in actively shaping public taste. This article turns to Blackwood's Magazine and investigates how it uses writing about food to reflect on the shaping of literary tastes. I argue that the magazine uses gastronomy both to justify its judgments of taste as naturalized, universal truths, and to reflect upon the processes of periodical production that belie such naturalness. Particularly through the logic of schooling – classifying writers into groups like the Cockney School or the less famous Leg of Mutton School – Blackwood's asserts a pre-existing, fixed standard of taste that the magazine at other moments claims to create, amend and defend against threats to its stability. Food culture's shifting significations offer means for writers to negotiate between taste as either a necessary precondition for literary production or a contingent product of those processes. Like the amorphous but vividly realized subjects authoring the magazine, taste is alternately poised between fixity and flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I propose that the early essays of John Stuart Mill propose an aesthetic liberalism that provides the basis of On Liberty's aims. Aesthetic liberalism is founded in a set of formal relations (exemplified in the essay form) that provides an alternative structure of communication (as a practice of handling and not knowing others) to the assertive, conflictual interactions of political liberalism and, ultimately, an alternative version of sympathy to that inherited from eighteenth-century moral philosophy and practiced in the novel. As a structure of communication, it comes under much pressure by 1859 and On Liberty and is suppressed entirely in Mill's later work. For its continuation later in the century we need to look outside Mill's work to later essayists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the late-Victorian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the collaborative pseudonym Michael Field, used fashionable dress to construct and advertise their unique poetic identity. Using evidence from their journal Works and Days, I contextualise Bradley and Cooper's clothing in terms of late-Victorian dress culture, and the major dress reform movements of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Bradley and Cooper used fashion as a distinctively feminine way of participating in aesthetic culture, marking significant life events, and to advertise their poetic identity. This self-fashioning also exposed them to aesthetic scrutiny from their peers Oscar Wilde and Bernard Berenson. Finally, I argue that fashion played a crucial role in Bradley and Cooper's desire for one another – and that this desire can be understood in terms of erotic reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the theme of materiality and the transformation of communication throughout the British Victorian era in response to essays by scholars Jonah Siegel, Athena Vrettos, and Richard Menke in the same issue. Topics include how Victorian aesthetics were developed in the essay "A Child in the Vatican," by Vernon Lee, the use of ancestral memory in Lee's Gothic tale "Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover," and how the technology of the telephone is used as a representation of complex media in Victorian literature.

The article explores Leo N. Tolstoy's writings on aesthetics, focusing especially on his essay "What is Art." Some of the topics explored include aesthetic judgments, the "Antinomy of Taste" by Immanuelle Kant, and "The Philosophy of the Beautiful" by William Knight. It reports that Tolstoy's believes that aesthetic judgment can only be subjective in nature, it cannot have a universal nature, there are no philosophical laws which rule aesthetics, and aesthetics are generally bound by social and cultural conventions.

Copyright of Jahrbuch Musikpsychologie is the property of Audio Engineering Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An essay is presented that discusses the notion of wonder in the thought of poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Topics include the aesthetic theory espoused by Coleridge, the Elizabethan stage in relation to the aesthetics of playwright William Shakespeare's work, and the definition of poetry in the Romantic thought of Shelley.

The article discusses the theme of play in relation to the work of playwright Oscar Wilde in response to essays by critics Elisha Cohn, Thomas Prasch, and Daniel A. Novak in the same issue. Topics include the satirical play "Aristophanes at Oxford: O.W.," the relation of spiritualist Hester Dowden to Wilde's legacy, and the influence of Wilde on others who imitated his work. The author addresses conflict between Wilde's aesthetic perspective and ostensibly puritan critics, noting multiple uses of satire and parody in such debates.

The Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy’s oil painting The last moments of Mozart (1885) is just one of several ‘death-bed’ visual reconstructions of the composer from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mozart’s early death, and its connection to the unfinished Requiem, fascinated Romantic writers, biographers, music historians and several painters as well. Within this theme in Mozart’s posthumous reception, Munkácsy’s painting is one of the most dramatic images of the composer, and it stands as a testament to deeply rooted beliefs regarding Mozart’s genius and creative destiny. The last moments of Mozart is representative of the romantic ‘Dionysian’ construction of Mozart that rose up against the prevailing classicizing or ‘Apollonian’ vision of the composer. While Munkácsy’s large-scale canvas belongs to the sub-genre of Mozart deathbed iconography, it steers well away from the usual sentimentalized visual accounts that show the composer in the grip of emotional despair. Instead, the artist shows Mozart in the throes of a deeply internalized creative vision, synthesizing his life and work—death and the Requiem—in a visual transfiguration that elevates Mozart’s last moments to something beyond the earthly. The last moments of Mozart, and other similarly ‘kitsch’ and neglected paintings of Mozart, may help us reflect upon the role of images in our own inherited conceptions of the composer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced in 1890 to surrender his editorship of Commonweal, the radical paper of the Socialist League, William Morris turned to designing beautiful books at his Kelmscott Press. Traditionally interpreted as an aestheticist break from activism, Morris's Kelmscott moment, I argue, constitutes an extension of his socialist praxis and an attempt to redesign the idiom of agitational discourse typical of his era. Focusing on Commonweal and Kelmscott editions of A Dream of John Ball, I claim that Morris's private press served as a matrix for reconceiving the delivery and reception of socialist news. Giving material form to the epistemological, ethical, and sensuous dimensions of his novel language of social change, Morris's decorative activity proved more ground-breaking than the radicalism of his anarchist peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the association of modern music, works of art and arts with the aesthetics of the 19th-century.

The article presents an examination into the history of late 19th-century American art and its internal debates over aesthetic influences and identity. Details are given highlighting several dominant aesthetic ideologies seen in American art at the time, including contrasting views of what distinct style American works were to hold against or in-line with contemporary European movements, particularly Impressionism from France. Works by George Inness, George de Forest Brush, and Thomas Cole are referenced. A final list of cosmopolitan characteristics of American art of the period is then generated.

The article focuses on the art review “Le Salon de 1852," by brothers Jules de Goncourt and Edmond de Goncourt, which was originally published in the periodical "L'Eclair" about the Paris, France Salon of 1852, focusing particularly on the review of bronze sculpture entitled Un Jaguar dévorant un lièvre by French sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. The opinions of the Goncourts are compared to the 1851 opinions of art critic Gustave Planche. Other subjects include the aesthetic theories of Théophile Gautier, G.W.F. Hegel, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann; animals in art; neoclassicism; and the influence of eighteenth century French sculptural aesthetics upon nineteenth century works of art.

The article presents an analysis of John Stuart Mill's literary critical views regarding the definition of poetry, particularly his assertions of poetry being an essentially non-sense based form of expression and knowledge. Further analysis of this point is given through secondary readings of Edward Lear's critical views of Alfred Tennyson's poetry collections.

This study assesses Victorian artistic response to the crisis of the poor quality of Victorian London's water supply - a situation exacerbated by comparison of London to the ancient capitals, most notably Rome, and water's classical associations with beauty, purity, and bounty. Two major and distinct responses emerge: Victorian caricature and Victorian classicism. Artists from both camps summoned the classical tradition to allude to the irony of classical ideal versus contemporary reality. In low Victorian art the truth lay in the caricature of the classical image. In high Victorian art the truth lay in the reality that the classical image could only serve to index. To be sure, the classical tradition furnished ample material through which the artist might allow a myth, for example, to allude subtly to a social problem, and through idealization, to suggest a powerful contrast between myth and reality. Thus the artist could "strike" with the requisite decorum and without appearing resistant to the artistic and sociopolitical establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the art, life, and culture in the U.S. in the last half of the 19th century, sometimes referred to as The Gilded Age. According to the article this period is often considered one of political corruption, high-living, excessive expenditure and popular misery. Aesthetically, it is known for sentimentality and an estrangement between art and life. The author suggests an adoption of the view of critics and historians such as Lewis Mumford, who felt that the age could be redeemed by a few great figures, and saw the period as one of transition and a seedbed of today’s culture.

In this article, I examine images of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe and America, and question the ways in which shifting sensory hierarchies constituted the representation of blindness in this period. I focus particularly on images of blind people reading by touch, an activity that became a public symbol of the various initiatives and advancements in education and training that were celebrated by both blind and sighted spokespeople. My discussion is structured around institutionally- and individually-commissioned portraits and I distinguish between the different agendas shaping representations of blind people. These include instances where blind people's achievements are problematically displayed for sighted benefactors; as well as examples of blind people determining the compositional form and modes of circulation of their likenesses thus altering "key directions in figurative possibilities" (Snyder 173). Moreover, the portraits I consider demonstrate the multisensory status of images, alerting us to a nineteenth-century aesthetic that was shaped by touch as well as vision. I draw on sensory culture theory to argue that attending to the experience and representation of the haptic in the circulation of visual images of blind people signals a participatory beholding, via which blindness is creatively -- rather than critically -- engaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a brief analysis of the poetic work "Burnt Norton," pat of the "Four Quartets," written by the 20th-century English author T. S. Eliot. Introductory details are given highlighting the use of the German term Erhebung within the poem and its typical interpretation as a reference to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. An alternative reading is then presented, linking the term instead to the aesthetic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

The article focuses on the goal of Formesth, a three-year multi-disciplinary research project on central European aesthetic formalism, which originated with Johann Friedrich Herbart and Bernard Bolzano, the German philosophers. The research project is being financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). The project was created to be able to study the aesthetics formalism in Central Europe and to re-examine the French history of the nineteenth-century philosophy.