Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings explores, discusses, and provides new perspectives on Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by poems and poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, ranging from the inauguration of the movement in 1848 until the end of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on two of the most influential figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, this book explores ways of considering art and literature together. The author traces the relationship of the poetry and poetics of Rossetti and Morris and their practice of visual art and design.

This illustrated book focuses on the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their radical departure from artistic conventions. Barringer explores the meanings encoded in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and analyses key pictures and their significance within the complex social and cultural matrix of 19th century Britain.

A provocative interdisciplinary study of the Victorian novel and Pre-Raphaelite art, this book offers a new understanding of Victorian novels through Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Concentrating on Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy and aligning each novelist with specific painters, this work interprets narrative redrawings of Pre-Raphaelite paintings within a range of cultural contexts as well as alongside recent theoretical work on gender. Letters, reviews, and journals convincingly reinforce the contentions about the novels and their connection with paintings. Featuring color reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, this book reveals the great achievement of Pre-Raphaelite art and its impact on the Victorian novel. Arguing for the direct relationship between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Victorian novel, this book fills a gap in the currently available literature devoted to the Victorian novel, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the connection of Pre-Raphaelite art to Victorian poetry. Visual readings of the Victorian novel channel the twenty-first-century readers' desire for the visual into the exploration of Pre-Raphaelite art in the Victorian novel, in the process offering fresh insights into the representation of gender in Victorian culture. Through a textual and a visual journey, this work reveals a new approach to the Victorian novel and Pre-Raphaelite art with profound implications for the study of both.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Philology), course: The Pre-Raphaelites in Art and Literature, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In 1848, at the peak of British industrialism and urbanization, a group of artists founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement which revolted against contemporary academic art. Searching for new themes of a higher truth and purity, the group did not only turn to artistic and literary sources of the Medieval Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism but also to the poetic work of the contemporary Victorian Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the poet laureate shared a poetic affinity with medieval literature and culture. The Middle Ages provided an ideal counter world of romance, chivalry, simple order, and religious faith. In an era of modern science, Darwinism, and religious scepticism, Tennyson found his sources of inspiration in Arthurian legends and Shakespearian drama. Between the mid 19th century and the end of World War I, Pre-Raphaelite artists produced a great number of paintings and illustrations, ie. the illustrated Moxon Edition of Poems (1857), based on the work of Alfred Tennyson. Significant thematic fascination was directed towards early romantic maiden poems, i.e. "Mariana" and "The Lady of Shalott", both published in 1832 and revised in 1842. This research paper will examine the structure, atmosphere, and symbolism of these Tennysonian ballads and analyze the corresponding paintings of John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and John William Waterhouse.

This useful volume presents the major works of the five leading Pre-Raphaelite poets. Foremost in the collection, and included in their entirety are D. G. Rossetti's The House of Life, C. G. Rossetti's "Monna Innominata," William Morris's "Defence of Guenevere," Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and Meredith's "Modern Love." Complementing these major poems is a fine, generous selection of the poets' shorter pieces that are typical of their work as a whole. For this second edition, Cecil Lang has substituted two early Swinburne poems, "The Leper" and "Anactoria," for Fitzgerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. These poems, which the editor describes as "shocking," show a new aspect of Swinburne not discussed previously. Lang's Introduction describes briefly the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, discusses each of the Pre-Raphaelite poets, both individually and in relation to the others, and grapples with the questions of definition of Pre-Raphaelitism and the similarities between its painting and poetry. The book is appropriately illustrated with thirty-two works by D. G. Rossetti, John Ruskin, William H. Hunt, and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. This is the only anthology available that provides a representative selection of the work of these important poets. It will be indispensable to students of Victorian poetry and appreciated by readers interested in the Pre-Raphaelites.

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement began in 1848, and experienced its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Influenced by the then little-known Keats and Blake, as well as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, Pre-Raphaelite poetry 'etherialized sensation' (in the words of Antony Harrison), and popularized the notion ofl'art pour l'art - art for art's sake. Where Victorian realist novels explored the grit and grime of the Industrial Revolution, Pre-Raphaelite poems concentrated on more abstract themes of romantic love, artistic inspiration and sexuality. Later they attracted Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.

Marie Spartali Stillman was one of a small number of professional female artists working in the second half of the 19th century. She was an important presence in the Victorian art world of her time and closely affiliated with members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. 'Poetry in Beauty', the first retrospective of Spartali Stillman's work, will showcase approximately 50 works by the artist. Spartali Stillman's style reflects her British Pre-Raphaelite training as well as the influence of Renaissance art, derived from the many years she lived and worked in Italy. Works from public and private collections in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, many of which have not been exhibited since Spartali Stillman's lifetime, will also be on view.

A revolutionary figure throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s work provides a distinctly revolutionary lens through which the Victorian period can be viewed. Suggesting that Rossetti’s work should be approached through his poetry, Brian Donnelly argues that it is both inscribed by and inscribes the development of verbal as well as visual culture in the Victorian era. In his discussions of modernity, aestheticism, and material culture, he identifies Rossetti as a central figure who helped define the terms through which we approach the cultural productions of this period. Donnelly begins by articulating a method for reading Rossetti’s poetry that highlights the intertextual relations within and between the poetry and paintings. His interpretations of such poems as the 'Mary’s Girlhood' sonnets, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, and 'The Orchard-Pit' in relationship to paintings such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini! shed light on Victorian ideals of femininity, on consumer culture, and on the role of gender hierarchies in Victorian culture. Situating Rossetti’s poetry as the key to all of his work, Donnelly also makes a case for its centrality in its representation of the dominant discourses of the late Victorian period: faith, sex, consumption, death, and the nature of representation itself.

A ground breaking new book that considers all Siddal poems with reference to female and primarily male counterparts, adding substantially to knowledge of her work as a writer, and their shared contemporary concerns. Dante Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Ruskin and Keats were either known to her or a source of influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which she was associated, and certain of their texts are compared with hers to discuss interplay between erotic and spiritual love, the ballad tradition, nineteenth-century feminism, and the Romantic concept of the conjoined physical and spectral body. Siddal’s artwork is used to introduce each chapter, while other Pre-Raphaelite paintings illuminate the texts and further the inter-disciplinary philosophy of the Brotherhood. This important and stimulating book focuses on the intrinsic merit of Siddal’s poetics whilst advocating a research method that could have multiple applications elsewhere.