The literate eye: Victorian art writing and the prose of modern aesthetics

This dissertation analyzes a body of literature which British authors generated in an astonishing profusion in the nineteenth century: the criticism, history, and theory of the visual arts. I describe art writing as a discourse that expanded dramatically in the 1840's, stimulated by the building and expansion of museums, the circulation of cheaply-reproduced art images, and the growth of a middle class with disposable income. Each chapter focuses on a different controversy in the visual art world that provoked furious literary debate. Chapter One looks at critical responses to Turner's quasi-abstract late canvases, and Ruskin's defense of them in Modern Painters I; Chapter Two examines debates over art works displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851; Chapter Three contextualizes Walter Pater's essay “School of Giorgione” with the 1877 Grosvenor Gallery show, where Whistler exhibited his scandalous “Nocturnes”; Chapter Four analyzes the radical socialist aesthetics of William Morris and Oscar Wilde; and Chapter Five reads Roger Fry's defenses of French Post-Impressionism in the context of his contact with other non-Western art forms from British colonial territories.;Rather than seeing art writing as a subordinate part of the Victorian visual world, my project places this literature at the center of Victorian debates about culture, class, and national identity. My argument suggests that many of the aesthetic ideas we canonically associate with the twentieth century in fact arose out of these social changes in the Victorian world. Such notions as “culture” and “form” were harnessed to oppose popular, commodified kinds of art like genre paintings; and the Modernist promotion of the formalist autonomy of art was in fact a version of arguments made in the nineteenth century, as Victorian writers attempted to reverse the perceived “degradation of art” by a new and uneducated art-viewing public. In other words, this project works to redefine aesthetic Modernism as a set of propositions arising, in part, out of new economic, political, and cultural developments in Victorian Britain.