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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

John Ruskin's use of the visual when preparing his wide ranging work was key to its value. This study analyses the uses to which the various media were put and from Ruskin's practice, distils a set of informal rules that he applied when deciding which medium to use. These were tested in a series of case studies by applying them to contemporary media. The study is based on Ruskin's use of contemporary techniques had he had them available to his, rather than what use he would have made of them had he been alive today. This latter position would have introduced too many unknown variables. Particular attention was paid to his use of photography due to its introduction and rapid improvement during his lifetime. This was used as an indicator of his acceptance of modem techniques. Additionally, the question of the likelihood of his adoption of digital technology was addressed. The evidence of his use of available media led to the view that he would generally have accepted it. However. he would have made greater use of his practice of instructing an assistant actually to carry out the necessary tasks. The conclusion is that Ruskin would not have objected to the wider use of technology as an aid to recording even though it is today much more pervasive than in his lifetime

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This study is a cultural materialist analysis of the spectacular commodity economy of the fin-de-siecle as mediated and represented in the iconography of the artist that Oscar Wilde and Henry James employ. The figure of the artist within the dominant social organisation of the fin-de-siecie is studied in relation to residual, dominant and emergent social formations. Focussing on four distinct figures, I examine the ways in which the discursive subject positions of the actress, the critic, the revolutionary and the child are oppositional because they represent positions that frustrate and evade the forceful processes that seek to incorporate individuals to the hegemony. This evasion is achieved because these positions exploit ambiguities within the discursive formations. Each of these positions is characterised by the same qualities of marginality, vulnerability and mutability, qualities traditionally identified as weaknesses, which I identify here as paradoxical strengths. The figure of the actress captures the force with which the processes of hegemony reify women, but she also represents an alternative to those schemes of identity formation. The vulnerability of the actress before the hegemonic discourses, a vulnerability that the artist shares, is paradoxically the quality that offers the greatest opportunity for constructing alternative positions. In a corruptly theatrical world the actress's art allows her to confound the possessive male gaze, and to evade the roles scripted for her by hegemony. The figure of the actress represents the first example of the theatrically multiple subjectivity that James and Wilde identify and explore. The critic is inextricably bound by systems of exchange and the logic of the marketplace and this represents the vulnerability of the critic. This vulnerability though depends upon the critic's intermediate position and this intermediate position is a site, I argue, which James and Wilde exploit as they re-conceptualise the action of culture and the work that art achieves. At the fin-de-siecle this work was recognised as necessary and urgent by many intellectuals. The developing mass culture presented an emergent form of social organisation, one that offered substantial opportunities for change. Cultural critics sought to find ways to understand and influence these social forms. Both Henry James and Oscar Wilde critique the dominant narratives of art and culture through their readings and rewritings of Matthew Arnold's works. Their rewritings reveal the complicity of Arnold's formulations of hegemony at the same time as they identify oppositional positions and strategies. These oppositional positions and strategies depend upon redefining the existing relations of production and consumption that govern aesthetic encounters. The work that art does becomes the transformation of the individual's consciousness, a change from the fixed bourgeois self to a theatrically multiple subjectivity. The critic mimes this change in order to make the process available to all. The revolutionary represents the vulnerability of the individual to political discourses of reaction and revolution. This vulnerability is realised by James and Wilde in their works through the figure of the scapegoat, an individual whose relation to the group is explicitly dangerous and revelatory. I argue that James and Wilde both identify a theatrically multiple subjectivity and I trace the genealogy of this subjectivity in Hegelian thought. I illustrate how Henry James's investigation of city-spaces demonstrates his understanding of the creation and regulation of subjects in modernity. The figure of the child is a familiar role for the romantic artist but the romantic child is also the latent being intently examined by late nineteenth century psychology, ethnology, and physiology. I argue that the potential of the child, as its promise and its threat, reveal the means through which subject positions are established, fixed and regulated, and holds out the promise of evading those regulatory schemes. I read Oscar Wilde's fairy-tales in the context of late nineteenth century folklore research, in particular the writings of Andrew Lang, and I relate James's literary children in 'The Turn of the Screw' and What Maisie Knew to his developing modernist literary form. I conclude that a significant contribution of these writers to the establishment of a distinctively Modernist literary practice was their detailed exploration and examination of the relationship of the artist to the dominant and emergent social formations, and their commitment to an active role for the artist in contesting the limits of modern subjectivity, doing battle with the forces of capital.

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I examine Wilde’s Hellenism in terms of the specific texts, editions and institutions through which he encountered ancient Greece. The late-nineteenth-century professionalisation of classical scholarship and the rise of the new science of archaeology from the 1870s onwards endangered the status of antiquity as a textual source of ideal fictions rather than a material object of positivist study. The major theme of my thesis is Wilde’s relationship with archaeology and his efforts to preserve Greece as an imaginative resource and a model for right conduct. From his childhood Wilde had accompanied his father Sir William Wilde on digs around Ireland. Sir William’s ethnological interests led him to posit a common racial origin for Celts and Greeks; thus, for Wilde, to read a Greek text was to intuit native affinity. Chapters 1–3 trace his education, his travels in Greece, his involvement with the founding of the Hellenic Society, and his defence of the archaeologically accurate stage spectaculars of the 1880s, arguing that in his close association with supporters of archaeology such as J.P. Mahaffy and George Macmillan Wilde exemplifies the new kind of Hellenist opposed by Benjamin Jowett and R.C. Jebb. Chapter 4 makes a case for Wilde’s final repudiation of archaeology and his return to the textual remains of Greek antiquity, present as an intertexual resource in his mature works. Thus I examine the role of Aristotle’s Ethics in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and of Platonism in the critical dialogues, The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ I present The Importance of Being Earnest as a self-conscious exercise in the New Comedy of Menander, concluding that Wilde ultimately returned to the anachronistic eclecticism of the Renaissance attitude to ancient texts.