This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of 'art-for-art's-sake' and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater's efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a 'fall' into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne's and Pater's efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson - and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation.

This thesis analyses the work of the artists living and painting in the area around the fishing village of Cullercoats and examines the conditions which fostered and maintained this colony during the period 1870 to 1914. As part of this process, two hitherto disparate bodies of scholarship are considered in tandem. Firstly, the increasing number of studies into European artists' colonies, encompassing consideration of both the phenomenon itself and of the artworks produced at them. Secondly, the locally-based recovery of late-Ivth-cenrury north east artists and their milieu, which has grown out of regional exhibition projects. Exposing the very clear areas of commonality between the two spheres of study underscores the central questions which this thesis addresses; namely, can the group of artists at Cullercoats be described as a colony; and if so, why has it been so consistently denied a place in colony surveys to-date? Answers are sought by engaging with a number of inter-related issues. These include the particular economic and social conditions which could sustain a local artists' colony and the variety of art clubs, exhibition spaces and sales venues which the colony fostered: the specific elements which are necessarily present to mark out a 'colony', rather than merely a 'sketching ground': the wider contemporary awareness of the colony and its work and how this compares with similar coastal colonies in Britain: the unpicking of the ideologies which underpinned the Naturalist subject in British art in the late-LOth century, including issues of race and gender ideals, nationalism and regionalism, tourism, and anxieties over urbanisation and industrialisation. The scope of this thesis demands an inter-disciplinary approach, combining social, economic and political history, gender studies, the wider field of 'cultural studies', as well as the usual analytical tools of the art historian. In essence, the thesis combines an empirical and theoretical contextualisation as the framework for a fresh perspective on the position and work of the Cullercoats artists' colony, which has wider implications for our understanding of European Naturalism and the colony phenomenon.

No description available.

This thesis examines the values and attitudes of the British Army’s officer corps during the period from 1871 to 1901, and how these values were linked to those of the British landed classes. Through studying the memoirs and other writings produced by the officers of this period, this thesis confirms that the link between these two systems was extremely close, and that the landed classes’ ideas of what constituted ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour were vitally important in shaping army officers’ conduct. This thesis argues that the acceptance of these values by the officer corps was not merely a product of their own social origins, but that officers subscribed to these values because they believed them to be particularly appropriate to military service. This attachment to gentlemanly values produced a deeply imbalanced set of competencies in the officer corps’ members, the effects of which remained present in the institutional culture of the army well beyond the end of this period. / Graduate / 2021-08-28

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T20:20:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Helena de Lima Corvini.pdf: 402435 bytes, checksum: c27b65909c893b98758526a82026bf2a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05-23 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This present dissertation intends to accompany Oscar Wilde's steps through late Victorian London, the booming center of an already decadent Empire. At this time being, positivist and imperialist discourses explain the reality. Both the medical science and the law fight over the theme of homosexuality. In a time when the symbolic authority to name homosexual desire is being questioned, Wilde is brave enough to state the precedence of the artist in naming the world. His life and works cause exalted reactions. His excentricities outrage London's high-society, of which Wilde becomes the arbiter of elegance, despite being a complete outsider: Irish and homosexual. He lives Aestheticism and dandism to the fullest, he lives a purposedly gay lifestyle and excites the fear of exerting some sort of "corruption" or "influence" over young men of the British society. His writing, through the use of paradoxes and symbolic invertions, shows the underpinnings of the aparently neutral text of normative reality. In his judgment, he is turned into the scapegoat of a severely repressed and puritan society. His works have founded the camp sensibility and a decidedly homosexual aesthetics / A presente dissertação busca acompanhar os passos de Oscar Wilde pela Londres da era vitoriana tardia, o centro pujante de um Império já em decadência. Nesse momento, o status quo produz um discurso positivista e imperialista sobre o mundo. A homossexualidade é disputada pelos discursos da ciência médica e da jurisprudência. Numa época em que a autoridade simbólica para nomear o desejo homoerótico se encontra questionada, Wilde tem a ousadia de afirmar a primazia do artista em nomear o mundo. Com sua vida e sua obra, Wilde provoca reações exaltadas. Suas excentricidades chocam a alta sociedade londrina, da qual se torna o árbitro da elegância, apesar de sua posição de outsider: irlandês e homossexual. Vivendo plenamente os ideários do Esteticismo e do dandismo, tem um estilo de vida acintosamente gay e suscita o medo da "corrupção" e da "influência" sobre os homens jovens por parte da sociedade inglesa. As masculinidades estão sendo elaboradas nesse momento e há o medo de que os homens jovens deixem de ser viris cavalheiros para se tornarem afeminados dândis. Em seus escritos, por meio de paradoxos e inversões simbólicas, Wilde também mostra a costura por baixo do texto aparentemente neutro da realidade normativa. Em seu julgamento, é transformado em bode expiatório de uma sociedade severamente reprimida e puritana. Suas obras permanecem hoje como fundadoras da sensibilidade camp e de uma estética decididamente homossexual

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T14:53:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Helena de Lima Corvini.pdf: 402435 bytes, checksum: c27b65909c893b98758526a82026bf2a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05-23 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This present dissertation intends to accompany Oscar Wilde's steps through late Victorian London, the booming center of an already decadent Empire. At this time being, positivist and imperialist discourses explain the reality. Both the medical science and the law fight over the theme of homosexuality. In a time when the symbolic authority to name homosexual desire is being questioned, Wilde is brave enough to state the precedence of the artist in naming the world. His life and works cause exalted reactions. His excentricities outrage London's high-society, of which Wilde becomes the arbiter of elegance, despite being a complete outsider: Irish and homosexual. He lives Aestheticism and dandism to the fullest, he lives a purposedly gay lifestyle and excites the fear of exerting some sort of "corruption" or "influence" over young men of the British society. His writing, through the use of paradoxes and symbolic invertions, shows the underpinnings of the aparently neutral text of normative reality. In his judgment, he is turned into the scapegoat of a severely repressed and puritan society. His works have founded the camp sensibility and a decidedly homosexual aesthetics / A presente dissertação busca acompanhar os passos de Oscar Wilde pela Londres da era vitoriana tardia, o centro pujante de um Império já em decadência. Nesse momento, o status quo produz um discurso positivista e imperialista sobre o mundo. A homossexualidade é disputada pelos discursos da ciência médica e da jurisprudência. Numa época em que a autoridade simbólica para nomear o desejo homoerótico se encontra questionada, Wilde tem a ousadia de afirmar a primazia do artista em nomear o mundo. Com sua vida e sua obra, Wilde provoca reações exaltadas. Suas excentricidades chocam a alta sociedade londrina, da qual se torna o árbitro da elegância, apesar de sua posição de outsider: irlandês e homossexual. Vivendo plenamente os ideários do Esteticismo e do dandismo, tem um estilo de vida acintosamente gay e suscita o medo da "corrupção" e da "influência" sobre os homens jovens por parte da sociedade inglesa. As masculinidades estão sendo elaboradas nesse momento e há o medo de que os homens jovens deixem de ser viris cavalheiros para se tornarem afeminados dândis. Em seus escritos, por meio de paradoxos e inversões simbólicas, Wilde também mostra a costura por baixo do texto aparentemente neutro da realidade normativa. Em seu julgamento, é transformado em bode expiatório de uma sociedade severamente reprimida e puritana. Suas obras permanecem hoje como fundadoras da sensibilidade camp e de uma estética decididamente homossexual

No description available.