First Published in 1999. John Ruskin (1819-1900), Walter Pater (1839-1894), and Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) represent three generations of English aesthetes whose writings have transformed art history and the formations of museums as we know them. They are three great writers in a distinctively English tradition. Concerned with the nature of aesthetic experience, and with the interpretation of visual art, they offer approaches that are dramatically different, in challenging ways, from those of professional art historians. They published autobiographies, explaining the relationship of their conceptions of aesthetic experience to their critical thinking about social questions. With England and Its Aesthetes , David Carrier has assembled the autobiographical sketches of these influential aesthetes. His reading reveals them to be less concerned with art appreciation or an aesthetic approach to everyday life than with issues of identity, politics, and desire.

Schaffer (English, Queens College, City U. of New York) analyzes the complex dialogue between male and female aesthetes in late Victorian England, exploring the heretofore insufficiently recognized role that women such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, and others played in this influential late Victorian literary movement. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, it aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture.

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies is a work by George Santayana. The author was a philosopher, essayist, and poet, here presenting his monologues that are to be addressed to oneself, also known as soliloquies.

First published in 1978, this book explores everyday Victorian likes and dislikes, manners, fashions, ideals and illusions. It discusses their changing attitudes to women, children, the poor, the common soldier and their country. It explains the rise and fall of home entertainment, the growth of soccer, racing and cricket to national sports, the rise of public schools and new professions as well as the appeal of missionary work. It is argued that all this happened not because the Victorians were fools, hypocrites or villains, but because they sensibly adapted themselves to peculiar and novel circumstances. This title will be of interest to students of history.

This volume deals with the various (direct and indirect) connections between literary figures, artists and locations during the Victorian era. It also addresses influential figures from before and after this period, such as William Blake, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mother Teresa, as well as the connection between Britain and America in certain contexts. In establishing such relationships, this volume, therefore, covers a wide range of writers and painters, such as Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, D. G. Rossetti, J. E. Millais, Herman Melville, J.M.W. Turner, G. M. Hopkins, William Butterfield, W. H. Ainsworth, and Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, while also including cultural topics related to both Victorian society and the eras which preceded it.

This three-volume collection of primary sources examines philosophy and literature in the nineteenth-century Britain. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of British Literature and Philosophy.