Goodwin: Modern American Grotesque

Modern American Grotesque

Literature and Photography

James Goodwin

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century.

A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin’s book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

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Shires: Perspectives

Perspectives

Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England

Linda M. Shires

Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England reopens the question of classical perspective and its vicissitudes in aesthetic practice with a focus on texts of the 1830s to the end of the 1870s. Linda M. Shires demonstrates why and how artists and writers across media experimented with techniques of dissolution, combination, and multiple viewpoints much earlier in the century than intellectual historians generally assume.

Arguing for a relationship between what she calls the disappearing “I” in poetry, a compromised omniscience, and the testing of a mastering eye in painting and photography, Shires argues that art forms themselves, rather than new technologies alone, reshaped the period by educating readers and viewers into new ways of knowing. In chapters on visual and verbal art and a waning theocentrism; D.G. Rossetti; Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden; and Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Shires revitalizes the currently available scholarship on connections among nineteenth-century art forms.

This interdisciplinary study offers nuanced, close readings in order to rebut assertions of delayed artistic responses to the decreasing influence of traditional perspective. It shows how vision is bound up with all the senses of a viewer and it supports current concepts of modernism as transitional, rather than radical.

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Losano: The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

Antonia Losano

The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists.

Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios—a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical—by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward—and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.

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Altick: Paintings from Books

Paintings from Books

Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900

Richard D. Altick

Breaking new ground in the study of British painting and literature, Richard D. Altick reveals in this informative and richly illustrated volume how the literary taste of the day was reflected, sometimes controversially, on the walls of London’s annual art exhibitions. Armed with catalogues that were miniature anthologies of poetic extracts, gallery-goers looked at prominent artists’ versions of their favorite characters and scenes in poetry, fiction, and the drama, and judged them according to the preconceptions already formed in their mind’s eye. Beginning in Hogarth’s time and the first years of the Royal Academy and lasting down to the end of Victoria’s reign, paintings with subjects from English literature—some twelve thousand are recorded—reaffirmed in a new context the ancient belief in the sisterhood of the arts.

In the early years, when the lofty goal of history painting in the grand style beckoned ambitious artists, they drew their subjects mainly from Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser. Later, as the affluent middle-class market for household art grew, and with it the demand for congenial literary subjects, Burns, Scott, Byron, and Tennyson joined the company of most-painted authors. From the Lady of Shalott and the nude Musidora in Thomson’s The Seasons to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost and domestic genre scenes from Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, British art served for more than a century and a half as a comprehensive mirror of the currents and eddies of literary taste.

The developments traced in this book, which is based on an exhaustive study of the graphic and printed annals of British art and the records of individual authors’ fame, makes it clear that we can say of literary pictures what Henry James once said of English art in particular: “English painting interests me chiefly, not as painting, but as English. It throws little light, on the whole, on the art of Titian and Rembrandt; but it throws a light which is to me always fresh, always abundant, always fortunate, on the turn of the English mind.”

Following the dozen chapters that constitute the narrative portion of the book, Parts Two and Three comprise a convenient guide to the art histories of each of Shakespeare’s plays and the works of some thirty other authors. A finding-list of reproductions of literary paintings and a large bibliography enhance the book’s value to readers interested in learning more about this hitherto neglected subject.

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