ENGL 2423 X1 Victorian Art and Aesthetics
Dr. Patricia Rigg
We will trace the development of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism, beginning with High Victorian attitudes toward art and literature, through the Pre-Raphaelite integration of the “Sister Arts” of poetry and painting, and into “High” Victorian Aestheticism, the evolution of the “New Woman,” and the Decadent Movement of the 1890s that prefigured Literary Modernism. We will read novels and poems, as well as prose essays, and will include the visual arts of painting and sketching. Some of the authors we will include are Tennyson, Browning, Augusta Webster, Vernon Lee, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and a number of exciting poets that represent British Aestheticism and Decadence. We’ll read literature that represents specific contexts of Aestheticism, such as Queer Aesthetics and Feminist Aesthetics.