William Michael Rossetti (1829&–1919) always presented himself as the third Rossetti: a civil servant and critic unworthy to be compared with his brother, Dante Gabriel, and his sister, Christina. Not everyone has readily accepted Rossetti's evaluation of himself. The painter William Rothenstein remembered him as a man whose &"outlook on life was broad and humane,&" and the only one of the Pre-Raphaelites &"who was sympathetic towards the work of younger writers and painters.&" More recently, Professor W. E. Fredeman has written of him as &"among the P.R.B.s... almost the only man of action,&" and the essential figure in the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its magazine, The Germ. The publication of this edition of more than six hundred of his letters (most of them previously unpublished), to such leading literary and artistic figures as Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Browning, Swinburne, Whistler, and Whitman, demonstrates convincingly the range and quality of his friendships, his active involvement in the cultural life of Victorian England, and the complexity of his character. The letters also offer a detailed account of his powerful advocacy of the work of Blake and Shelley, of Swineburne and Whitman among his contemporaries, and, after their deaths, of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Throughout his life Rossetti was intensely aware of the political and social events of his time, both in Europe and the United States, and the letters contain numerous references to the Crimean, Franco-Prussian, and Boer wars, the Paris Commune, the American Civil War, women's suffrage, and Italian unification. The letters have been extensively annotated, making use of the hundreds of letters by Rossetti not included in the edition, his twenty-volume diary, and the thousands of letters to him preserved in the Angeli-Dennis Papers at the University of British Columbia.

Vol 1 905p Vol 2 961p.

This vibrant collection of essays claims that a complex network of texts by critics, biographers and diarists established the credibility and influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Throughout the twentieth century, Modernist taste failed to acknowledge the achievement of oppositional groupings such as the Pre-Raphaelites. The essays collected here, however, reveal that the British group anticipated later avant-gardes by using the written word to configure for itself a radical artistic identity. Public and critics alike were scandalized by the radicalism of Pre-Raphaelite painting, its unflinching portrayal of historical figures and of contemporary life, and its irreverent attitude to artistic convention. Pre-Raphaelitism's innovations were not confined to style: new forms of artistic identity and behaviour were explored. As the contributors interrogate the texts through which Pre-Raphaelitism was constructed, they demonstrate that the movement's wide influence as a cultural phenomenon derived from the interplay between exhibited works and critical discourse. Applying a range of sophisticated methodologies from the fields of literary studies, art history, and cultural studies, these interdisciplinary essays uncover the neglected role of texts in the success of the Pre-Raphaelite rebellion and argue in favor of a new centrality for this movement in the history of nineteenth-century European culture.

Catalog of the author's library of 1st editions of the famous English poets and dramatists from Elizabethan times until the present.