The Radical Print: British Art and Graphic Experiment in the Paper Ag

This dissertation examines connections between high art, printmaking and political radicalism in late eighteenth-century Britain to argue for the print as a formative site of artistic modernity. In a series of case-studies from James Barry's Phoenix (1776) to William Blake's Laocoon (1826-27), it establishes a framework for thinking about art in what contemporaries called the "Paper Age," in which pamphlets, newspapers, and banknotes, among other print genres, mediated the values and ideas of a society in the midst of intensified political contestation and change. This is the first study to bring the prints of Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, Thomas Bewick and Blake together for exploration through the lens of radical politics. Considering these artists as a group of printmakers allows for new connections and comparison, but it also provides a way to approach the larger question of artistic transformation in an "Age of Revolution." It further suggests how the print itself shared a number of late eighteenth-century radicalism's structuring concerns: the related problems of temporality, freedom, mediation, and the location of an origin.;Chapter One examines Barry's Phoenix, produced in immediate response to the American Revolution, as a signaling instance of a larger claim: that radical politics stimulates revaluations at the level of medium as well as in iconography and style. The Phoenix lays down the challenge of thinking about the ephemeral political print as the locus of ambitious art; it reflects upon and reconfigures the temporality of the print.