Aestheticism in Victorian Britain: Art for Art's Sake Among the Pre-Raphaelites and the Wilde Circle
ENGL 261
Spring 2008
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01
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This course focuses on two groups of artists and intellectuals whose ideas about art and society were deliberately and self-consciously dissident and experimental: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed at Oxford in 1848 and active in London until the early 1870s, and the circle centered around Oscar Wilde in the 1890s. Why, we will ask, did these artists and intellectuals espouse a theory of art for art's sake, and what did they mean when they did so? What were the philosophical, political, and artistic reasons they heralded aestheticism as a theory and practice of art, and what formal innovations and conventions did that practice entail? We will examine a variety of literary and nonliterary texts, from poetry and novels to aesthetic theory and paintings. Issues to be addressed include theories of art for art's sake; experimental and avant-garde ideas and practices of art; the social and cultural space occupied by well-educated and often well-off artists - an "elite margin"; the interaction among various modes of artistic expression, most especially painting and poetry; the relation between high art and the aesthetic way of life that by turns embraced artisanal crafts, popular culture, industrial production, and the decorative arts; and the sexual, gender, class, and (inter-)national dynamics of artistic production and consumption during these years. |
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Essential Capabilities:
None |
| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: ENGL201 |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
George Meredith, THE EGOIST; Thomas Hardy, JUDE THE OBSCURE; Henry James, PORTRAIT OF A LADY; Oscar Wilde, SALOME, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, and LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN; poems and paintings by William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, William Holman Hunt, Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson, W.B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and others; aesthetic theory by William Wordsworth, John Keats, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and others.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Research paper (25 pages). |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course fulfills the English Department's research seminar requirement for honors thesis writers.
Pre-requisite overrides will be granted for students with one upper-level course in literature or art history. |
| Instructor(s): Weiner,Stephanie Kuduk Times: .M.W... 02:40PM-04:00PM; Location: FISK312; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 8 | JR major: 8 | | |
| Seats Available: 10 | GRAD: 0 | SR non-major: 0 | JR non-major: 0 | SO: 3 | FR: X |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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