Pre Raphaelite Masculinities

Drawing on recent theoretical developments in gender and men?s studies, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities shows how the ideas and models of masculinity were constructed in the work of artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Paying particular attention to the representation of non-normative or alternative masculinities, the contributors take up the multiple versions of masculinity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti?s paintings and poetry, masculine violence in William Morris?s late romances, nineteenth-century masculinity and the medical narrative in Ford Madox Brown?s Cromwell on His Farm, accusations of ?perversion? directed at Edward Burne-Jones?s work, performative masculinity and William Bell Scott?s frescoes, the representations of masculinity in Pre-Raphaelite illustration, aspects of male chastity in poetry and art, Tannh?er as a model for Victorian manhood, and masculinity and British imperialism in Holman Hunt?s The Light of the World. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the plurality of masculinities that pervade the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

"Drawing on recent theoretical developments in gender and men?s studies, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities shows how the ideas and models of masculinity were constructed in the work of artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Paying particular attention to the representation of non-normative or alternative masculinities, the contributors take up the multiple versions of masculinity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti?s paintings and poetry, masculine violence in William Morris?s late romances, nineteenth-century masculinity and the medical narrative in Ford Madox Brown?s Cromwell on His Farm, accusations of ?perversion? directed at Edward Burne-Jones?s work, performative masculinity and William Bell Scott?s frescoes, the representations of masculinity in Pre-Raphaelite illustration, aspects of male chastity in poetry and art, Tannh?er as a model for Victorian manhood, and masculinity and British imperialism in Holman Hunt?s The Light of the World. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the plurality of masculinities that pervade the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."--Provided by publisher.

Herbert Sussman's book explores ideas of manhood and masculinity as they emerged in the early Victorian period, and traces these through diverse formations in the literature and art of the time. Concentrating on representative major figures - Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Walter Pater - Sussman focuses on areas of conflict and contradiction within their formulation of the masculine. He identifies the development of a 'masculine poetics' as a project which was for the Victorians, and continues to be, crucial to an industrial and commercial age. The book reveals manhood as an unstable equilibrium, and is responsive to the complex ways in which the early Victorians' masculine poetics simultaneously subverts and maintains patriarchal power.

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers a range of Pre-Raphaelite literary scholarship, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of Pre-Raphaelitism. The authors in this collection position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making, aiming to identify and explore the Pre-Raphaelites’ diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, gendered, and sacred. Each chapter examines how Pre-Raphaelitism takes up and explores modes of making and re-making identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even, time and space. Essays explore themes of formalist or prosodic approaches, expanded networks of literary and artistic influence within Pre-Raphaelitism, and critical legacies and responses to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and arts, codifying the methods, forms, and commonalties that constitute literary Pre-Raphaelitism.

The fictional world of women in the time of Jane Austen set in the context of social and economic reality.

Overlooked stories of the female painters and subjects of Pre-Raphaelite art When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood exhibited their first works in 1849 it heralded a revolution in British art. Styling themselves the "Young Painters of England," this group of young men aimed to overturn stale Victorian artistic conventions and challenge the previous generation with their startling colors and compositions. Think of the images created by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others in their circle, however, and it is not men but pale-faced young women with lustrous, tumbling locks that spring to mind, gazing soulfully from the picture frame or in dramatic scenes painted in glowing colors. Who were these women? What is known of their lives and their roles in a movement that spanned over half a century? Some were models, plucked from obscurity to pose for figures in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, while others were sisters, wives, daughters and friends of the artists. Several were artists themselves, with aspirations to match those of the men, sharing the same artistic and social networks yet condemned by their gender to occupy a separate sphere. Others inhabited and sustained a male-dominated art world as partners in production, maintaining households and studios and socializing with patrons. Some were skilled in the arts of interior decoration, dressmaking, embroidery, jewelry-making--the fine crafts that formed a supportive tier for the "higher" arts of painting and sculpture. Although their backgrounds and life experiences certainly varied widely, all were engaged in creating Pre-Raphaelite art. Containing over 100 beautifully reproduced images, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters illustrates the obscure stories of some of the movement's most familiar faces. "

This study examines the construction of masculinity in culture based on an analysis of pictorial representations of the male in many contexts: social; historical; legal; literary; institutional; anthropological; educational; marital; imperial; and aesthetic. Artists featured include Burne-Jones.