The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
Author: Valerie Derbyshire
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2019-12-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1622737466

This book considers the relationships between British Romantic-era novelist, poet and writer of educational works for children, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), and a number of visual artists of the eighteenth century with whom she had connections. By exploring these associations with artists such as George Smith of Chichester, George Romney, James Northcote, John Raphael Smith and Emma Smith, the book demonstrates how the artwork of these individual artists influenced Charlotte Smith’s literary corpus. It also shows a mutual influence: how the literary works of Charlotte Smith impacted the corpora of these artists. This study uncovers information which was not heretofore known regarding these artists: it reveals a mistaken attribution of a sketch which accompanied the second volume of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1797) and sheds light on a print, held by the British Museum, which was previously shrouded in mystery. The artworks also enhance the existing scholarly knowledge about Smith’s biography. This book analyses the tropes and motifs employed by Smith’s artist-associates in the context of the popular aesthetics of the period and undertakes parallel readings between such visual artistry and Smith’s literary works. The book deliberates on how Smith utilises these aesthetics as narrative devices, making use of the tropes of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful, as well as that of a national British heraldic artwork, in order to produce and enhance meaning in her literary oeuvre. Thus, Smith uses aesthetic structures as vehicles for social critique, commentating on political, gender, moral and class concerns in addition to enhancing the perceived authenticity of her own artistry. The scholarship aims to correct the common misperception that Smith was a lonely marginal figure of Romanticism and instead asserts her central position in an enormous network of key artistic figures of British Romanticism.

Picturesque and Sublime

Picturesque and Sublime
Author: Tim Barringer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300233531

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is widely acknowledged as the founder of American landscape painting. Born in England, Cole emigrated in 1818 to the United States, where he transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American idiom. He embraced the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. Including striking paintings and a broad range of works on paper, from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, this book explores the trans-Atlantic context for Cole's oeuvre. These works chart a history of landscape aesthetics and demonstrate the essential role of prints as agents of artistic transmission. The authors offer new interpretations of work by Cole and the British artists who influenced him, including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, revealing Cole's debt to artistic traditions as he formulated a profound new category in art. the American sublime.

A Companion to Romanticism

A Companion to Romanticism
Author: Duncan Wu
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 566
Release: 1999-10-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780631218777

The Companion to Romanticism is a major introductory survey from an international galaxy of scholars writing new pieces, specifically for a student readership, under the editorship of Duncan Wu.

The Picturesque and the Sublime

The Picturesque and the Sublime
Author: Susan Glickman
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780773521353

Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English and the Raymond Klibansky Prize, The Picturesque and the Sublime is a cultural history of two hundred years of nature writing in Canada, from eighteenth-century prospect poems to contemporary encounters with landscape. Arguing against the received wisdom (made popular by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood) that Canadian writers view nature as hostile, Susan Glickman places Canadian literature in the English and European traditions of the sublime and the picturesque. Glickman argues that early immigrants to Canada brought with them the expectation that nature would be grand, mysterious, awesome – even terrifying – and welcomed scenes that conformed to these notions of sublimity. She contends that to interpret their descriptions of nature as "negative," as so many critics have done, is a significant misunderstanding. Glickman provides close readings of several important works, including Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm," Charles G.D. Roberts's Ave, and Paulette Jiles's "Song to the Rising Sun," and explores the poems in the context of theories of nature and art. Instead of projecting backward from a modernist perspective, Glickman reads forward from the discovery of landscape as a legitimate artistic subject in seventeenth-century England and argues that picturesque modes of description, and a sublime aesthetic, have governed much of the representation of nature in this country. Susan Glickman is a poet living in Toronto. She is the author of Complicity, The Power to Move, Henry Moore's Sheep and Other Poems, and Hide and Seek.

Mountains So Sublime

Mountains So Sublime
Author: Terry P. Abraham
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

"Picturesque," "immense," "fantastic," and "sublime" are but a few of the words that early British travelers used to describe the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountain landscape and surrounding terrain. As part of a long tradition of travelers' tales, these British tourists, explorers, adventurers, writers, scientists, artists, missionaries, and merchants all looked for ways to describe and illustrate places they visited--in this instance, the vast and strange wilderness landscape of the North America's Rocky Mountains. Using both published and unpublished resources, Terry Abraham weaves these observations, their aesthetic, and their "Britishness" into a refreshing and unique view of an all-but-vanished "West." In their efforts to make the Rocky Mountain West real to a readership on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, these visitors from two centuries past encouraged a growing realization that this part of the North American landscape was unique, a special part of the world's natural heritage. Many also tried to describe the changes that were being visited on the Rockies by onrushing progress. They were among the first who cautioned against excessive human encroachment on the landscape; in fact, they demonstrated what might be called "environmental pre-awareness." Twenty-first century readers will discover surprising parallels between modern environmental and conservation issues and the concerns expressed by these early travelers from the nineteenth.

Turner and the Sublime

Turner and the Sublime
Author: Andrew Wilton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 1981
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226061894

Examines the development of the aesthetic theory of the sublime and looks at Turner's prints, drawings, and watercolors to illuminate the ways he interpreted and individualized the eighteenth-century theory in his own works