[PDF] Art Politics And Society In Britain 1880 1914 eBook

Author : Trevor Harris
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 155 pages
File Size : 17,56 MB
Release : 2009-10-02
Category : History
ISBN : 1443815667

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The oldest word in politics is “new”. The oldest word in the writing of history may well be “modern”: it is, without doubt, one of the most overworked adjectives in the English language. But the indeterminacy is perhaps just another way of saying that the difficulties raised are of a kind which simply will not go away… This collection of eight essays on aspects of modernity and modernism takes up the challenge of examining the complex, but fascinating convergence of aesthetics, politics and a quasi-spiritual dimension which is perhaps typical of British modernist thinking about modernity. This may have produced figures whom we now dismiss as eccentrics or “aesthetes”, it none the less produced figures whom many still think of as in some sense embodying the national identity: what, after all, could be more “English” than a William Morris wallpaper design? Rather than towards socialism in any of its “scientific” guises, what the British modernist approach to modernity may have been pushing at was yet another mutation of liberalism: a libertarian-humanitarian hybrid in which indigenous radical and Evangelical legacies keep scientific socialism in check, where fellowship and domesticity edge out a larger-scale, more abstract “fraternity”, and where citoyenneté or civisme give way to what George Orwell was later to define simply as “decency”.

Author : Lucy Hartley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 29,16 MB
Release : 2017-08-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1316878600

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Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

Author : James Fox
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 43,20 MB
Release : 2015-07-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1316368912

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The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.

Author : Simon Heffer
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 912 pages
File Size : 28,16 MB
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1643136712

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A richly detailed history of Britain at its imperial zenith, revealing the simmering tensions and explosive rivalries beneath the opulent surface of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The popular memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful, contented, orderly, and thriving country. Britain commanded a vast empire: she bestrode international commerce. Her citizens were living longer, profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamed of and enjoying an expanding range of comforts and pastimes. The mood of pride and self-confidence can be seen in Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, newsreels of George V’s coronation, and London’s great Edwardian palaces. Yet beneath the surface things were very different In The Age of Decadence, Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He explains how, despite the nation’s massive power, a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny. He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century’s gravest constitutional crisis—and coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history. He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists’ public protest bordered on terrorism. He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy and scandal. He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car, the sensationalist press, and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, but also the nostalgia of A. E. Housman.

Author : Kristina Huneault
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 27,3 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Art
ISBN :

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The working women of Victorian and Edwardian Britain were fascinating but difficult subjects for artists, photographers, and illustrators. The cultural meanings of labour sat uncomfortably with conventional ideologies of femininity, and working women unsettled the boundaries between gender and class, selfhood and otherness. From paintings of servants in middle-class households, to exhibits of flower-makers on display for a shilling, the visual culture of women's labour offered a complex web if interior fantasy and exterior reality. The picture would become more challenging still when working women themselves began to use visual spectacle. In this first in-depth exploration of the representation of British working women, Kristina Huneault explores the rich meanings of female employment during a period of labour unrest, demands for women's enfranchisement, and mounting calls for social justice. In the course of her study she questions the investments of desire and the claims to power that reside in visual artifacts, drawing significant conclusions about the relationship between art and identity.

Author : Andrew Saint
Publisher : Lund Humphries Publishers Limited
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 26,49 MB
Release : 2022-02
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781848224650

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This book conveys the excitement, diversity and richness of London at a time when the city was arguably at the height of its power, uniqueness and attraction. Balancing the social, the topographical and the visible aspects of the great city, author Andrew Saint uses buildings, architecture, literature and art as a way into understanding social and historical phenomena. While many volumes on Victorian London focus on poverty (an issue which is included in this book), the author here provides a broader picture of life in the city. It is enlivened with a rich line-up of colourful characters, including Baron Albert Grant; Henry Mayers Hyndman and his connections with Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw; John Burns; Octavia Hill; Aubrey Beardsley and the artistic bohemians; Alfred Harmsworth and the Garrett sisters, and includes insightful quotes on London by esteemed authors such as Trollope, Henry James and Rudyard Kipling. Topics covered include: the creation of new neighbourhoods and roads; how the Victorians dealt with their housing crisis; why certain architectural styles were preferred; and the fashion for focusing on certain types of building.

Author : Ann-Marie Einhaus
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 13,83 MB
Release : 2017-05-24
Category : History
ISBN : 1474425720

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A new exploration of literary and artistic responses to WW1 from 1914 to the presentThis authoritative reference work examines literary and artistic responses to the wars upheavals across a wide range of media and genres, from poetry to pamphlets, sculpture to television documentary, and requiems to war reporting. Rather than looking at particular forms of artistic expression in isolation and focusing only on the war and inter-war period, the 26 essays collected in this volume approach artistic responses to the war from a wide variety of angles and, where appropriate, pursue their inquiry into the present day. In 6 sections, covering Literature, the Visual Arts, Music, Periodicals and Journalism, Film and Broadcasting, and Publishing and Material Culture, a wide range of original chapters from experts across literature and the arts examine what means and approaches were employed to respond to the shock of war as well as asking such key questions as how and why literary and artistic responses to the war have changed over time, and how far later works of art are responses not only to the war itself, but to earlier cultural production.Key FeaturesOffers new insights into the breadth and depth of artistic responses to WWIEstablishes links and parallels across a wide range of different media and genresEmphasises the development of responses in different fields from 1914 to the present

Author : Beverly Lemire
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 14,32 MB
Release : 2010
Category : History
ISBN : 9781409404927

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Throughout history, fashion has emerged as one of the most powerful driving forces determining the political, economic and social ramifications of the production, distribution and circulation of goods. Using fashion as the lens through which to analyse and understand cultural, economic and political shifts within a broad spectrum of societies from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, this volume represents an important shift in scholarship towards a more indepth understanding of the force of fashion.

Author : Angus Hawkins
Publisher :
Page : 443 pages
File Size : 40,43 MB
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 0198728484

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Victorian Britain is often described as an age of dawning democracy and as an exemplar of the modern Liberal state; yet a hereditary monarchy, a hereditary House of Lords, and an established Anglican Church survived as influential aspects of national public life with traditional elites assuming redefined roles. After 1832, constitutional notions of 'mixed government' gradually gave way to the orthodoxy of 'parliamentary government', shaping the function and nature of political parties in Westminster and the constituencies, as well as the relations between them. Following the 1867-8 Reform Acts, national political parties began to replace the premises of 'parliamentary government'. The subsequent emergence of a mass male electorate in the 1880s and 1890s prompted politicians to adopt new language and methods by which to appeal to voters, while enduring public values associated with morality, community and evocations of the past continued to shape Britain's distinctive political culture. This gave a particularly conservative trajectory to the nation's entry into the twentieth century. This study of British political culture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century examines the public values that informed perceptions of the constitution, electoral activity, party partisanship, and political organization. Its exploration of Victorian views of status, power, and authority as revealed in political language, speeches, and writing, as well as theology, literature, and science, shows how the development of moral communities rooted in readings of the past enabled politicians to manage far-reaching change. This presents a new over-arching perspective on the constitutional and political transformations of the Victorian age.