Haunted Texts

Haunted Texts
Author: William Evan Fredeman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802036629

Begun by young rebels committed to revolutionizing the creative arts, Pre-Raphaelitism has moved from the margins of nineteenth-century art and literature to the vanguard of interdisciplinary studies. The term is now used to denote the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Decadent movements in art, culture, and literature, but it has remained as difficult to define as ever. Haunted Texts attempts to meet the challenge of defining and illustrating the full spectrum of Pre-Raphaelitism. Working with a diverse range of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, painting, decorative arts, book illustration, and political prose, the ten contributors to Haunted Texts pursue the critical strategies of such leading figures as Christina Rossetti and Dante Rossetti, William Morris and Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Aubrey Beardsley. The essays consider the bibliocritical issues of archival research concerning the personal letters and diaries of the Rossetti family; the technological issues that challenge conventional methods of scholarship; the gender issues concerning constructions of identity derived from the changing conceptions of love, desire, anxiety, and brotherhood; and the interdisciplinary cultural issues that transgress the borders of high art and popular culture. Haunted Texts pays tribute to the scholarship of Professor William Fredeman who devoted much of his career since the 1950s to establishing a critical foundation that would enable future scholars to define their understanding of the complexity of Pre-Raphaelitism.

A Houghton Library Chronicle, 1942-1992

A Houghton Library Chronicle, 1942-1992
Author: Houghton Library
Publisher: Houghton Library
Total Pages: 124
Release: 1992
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Harvard's home for rare books and manuscripts opened in 1942, and thanks to the energy of a small group of librarians and the creativity and generosity of its benefactor, Arthur Houghton, it quickly emerged as a center of inquiry and memory without equal. This 1992 volume, compiled by senior Houghton librarians, blends documentary with oral history to look back on the library's origins, the growth of its collections, and the activities of the staff who made it a home for precious books and original scholarship.

Kenwood, Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest

Kenwood, Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest
Author: Julius Bryant
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300102062

Set high on a ridge in historic parkland less than five miles from Trafalgar Square, Kenwood is London's favourite 'country house'. Remodelled by Robert Adam in the eighteenth century, in 1928 it became the home of the Iveagh Bequest, a superb collection of old master paintings that includes Rembrandt's most celebrated self-portrait, the only Vermeer in England outside the National Gallery and the Royal Collection, Gainsborough's Countess Howe, and classic works by Reynolds, Romney, Lawrence and Turner. The collection was formed between 1887 and 1891 by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, Chairman of the world's leading brewery, who gave it to the nation with the house and estate. This book is published to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Iveagh Bequest and is the first new catalogue of the collection to be produced in fifty years. It discusses each work, revealing the personalities behind the faces in the portraits, the social circumstances of each commission, and the way that art met the ambitions of artists, patrons, sitters and collectors. There are also two introductory essays that provide context for the house and discuss the ways in which Lord Iveagh was a pioneer collector. Beautifully produced, this catalogue of paintings is the essential book on Kenwood.