Symbolism and Modern Urban Society

Symbolism and Modern Urban Society
Author: Sharon L. Hirsh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521810968

Symbolism and Modern Urban Society is the first social history of the Symbolist movement. Sharon Hirsh adopts a variety of methods, including gender theory, biography, visual analysis, and medical and literary history, in order to investigate this esoteric movement and ground it firmly in fin-de-siècle issues of modernity and the metropolis. Hirsh argues that Symbolism, often associated with notions of individualism, nostalgia, and visual reverie, offers an engaging critique of urbanity. Providing new definitions and theories for Symbolism and Decadence, she also addresses issues such as spatial/street confrontations with the crowd, the diseased city, the New Woman as 'should-be-mother', as well as the ideal city of Bruges and its social upheaval in the 1890s. Focusing on works by artists such as Van Gogh, Munch and Ensor, Hirsh also considers the works of artists who contributed in important ways to the Symbolist movement and the cities in which they worked.

Urban Symbolism

Urban Symbolism
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2023-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004609997

This volume deals with a hitherto largely neglected aspect of cities, namely the symbolic and ritual structure in which the urban community is rooted. This fascinating facet is explored in a combined effort by social anthropologists, sociologists, historians and philologists for cities like Jakarta, Padang, Bangkok, Beijing, Tokyo, Baghdad, Kathmandu, Lucknow, Francistown, Vitoria and Buenos Aires. Three perspectives on the study of symbolism in the urban arena are developed, namely the material, cultural and structural point of view. This results in a series of new concepts for comparative use and provides lively descriptions suffused by rich detail of the social processes by which urban symbols and rituals are constituted.

Spirituality, Feminism, and Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture

Spirituality, Feminism, and Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture
Author: Alice Eden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2024-04-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 135100428X

This book proposes new understandings of modern life in Britain by bringing constructs of female spirituality centre stage and examining three ‘forgotten’ artists identified with the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorianism. Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson are resituated squarely within the tumultuous social and cultural changes of the period. Becoming visible again, in more inclusive histories, allows such artists not only to re-inhabit but to reshape narratives of modernism, reanimating the scholarly discourse and creating a dynamic cultural history of modern Britain expressed through their striking visions of womanhood. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, gender studies and British studies.

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art
Author: Michelle Facos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351540092

With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan
Author: Lois Palken Rudnick
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2012-07-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0826351212

Internationally known as a writer, hostess, and patron of the arts of the twentieth century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962) is not known for her experiences with venereal disease, unmentioned in her four-volume published memoir. Making the suppressed portions of Luhan’s memoirs available for the first time, well-known biographer and cultural critic Lois Rudnick examines Luhan’s life through the lenses of venereal disease, psychoanalysis, and sexology. She shows us a mover and shaker of the modern world whose struggles with identity, sexuality, and manic depression speak to the lives of many women of her era. Restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000, Rudnick’s edition of these remarkable documents represents the culmination of more than thirty-five years of study of Luhan’s life, writings, lovers, friends, and Luhan’s social and cultural milieus in Italy, New York, and New Mexico. They open up new pathways to understanding late Victorian and early modern American and European cultures in the person of a complex woman who led a life filled with immense passion and pain.

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form
Author: Allison Morehead
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271079401

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.

Symbolist Art in Context

Symbolist Art in Context
Author: Michelle Facos
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520255828

The Symbolist art movement of the late 19th century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from conflicting definitions. In this book, Michelle Facos offers a comprehensive description of this challenging subject.

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies
Author: Lieven Ameel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 630
Release: 2022-08-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000605620

Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Strangers and Misfits

Strangers and Misfits
Author: Jason Philip Coy
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004161740

This book examines the role of banishment, a prevalent form of punishment largely neglected by scholars, in sixteenth-century Ulm, using the towna (TM)s experience to uncover how early modern magistrates used expulsion to regulate and reorder society.