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Pre-Raphaelitism was the first avant-garde movement in Britain. It shocked its first audience, and as it modulated into Aestheticism it continued to disturb the British public. In this fresh and original study, Professor Bullen traces the sources of that shock to the representation of the human ...

Pre-Raphaelitism was the first avant-garde movement in Britain. It shocked its first audience, and as it modulated into Aestheticism it continued to disturb the British public. In this fresh and original study, Professor Bullen traces the sources of that shock to the representation of the human body. By examining the discourses which were developed to denounce or to explain the new art forms he shows that the distorted, maimed, or eroticized body formed the principal focus of anxiety in nineteenth-century criticism. Using a truly interdisciplinary method he relates the painting of Millais and other early Pre-Raphaelites to fears about cholera and Catholicism; he demonstrates how the body of the sexualized female became an object of obsessive fascination in the painting and poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris; he locates the writing of Swinburne and Prater in the context of the debate over the `Woman Question', and he shows how the responses to the `Aesthetic' painting of Burne-Jones were conditioned by the sexual psychopathology of mid nineteenth-century mental science.

Victorian novelist Mary Ward, best known to her contemporaries as Mrs. Humphry Ward, was one of the most successful and complex women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into the powerful but patriarchal dynasty of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, she lived at the center of an intellectual and ...

Victorian novelist Mary Ward, best known to her contemporaries as Mrs. Humphry Ward, was one of the most successful and complex women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into the powerful but patriarchal dynasty of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, she lived at the center of an intellectual and cultural circle peopled by such eminent figures as Mark Pattison, Thomas Huxley, and Charles Darwin. Her novel Robert Elsmere (1888), the first in a series of bestsellers, earned her both unprecedented sums of money and the critical respect of such writers as Henry James. She helped found Somerville College, Oxford, the University's first institution of higher education of women, and helped create a number of play centers for the children of London's working poor. And as the first woman reporter to enter the trenches in 1916, she wrote articles that were instrumental in bringing America into the war. In Mrs. Humphry Ward, John Sutherland explores a goldmine of materials never before available to recapture a fascinating life, one in which extraordinary achievements were often overshadowed by private misfortune. Sutherland describes how Ward's parents' marriage was shattered by her father's religious peregrinations (an Anglican, he converted to Roman Catholicism, then returned to the Church of England, then became a Catholic again), how her own remarkable success placed considerable stress on her marriage, and how all her resources (both financial and emotional) went to support a renegade, spendthrift, and disappointing son. And he also sheds light on one of the great paradoxes of this accomplished woman's life--that she led the fight to block woman's suffrage. Throughout, Sutherland writes movingly of the private life of a remarkable public figure. A fascinating study of how much a woman could and could not do in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this engaging biography illuminates the intellectual climate of the late 19th century.