This dissertation offers a new literary history of the tradition of the “sister arts” in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While previous scholarship has explored how canonical male poets conceived of their poetry in relation to painting, this project demonstrates that female poets also engaged in various forms of literary pictorialism. By attending to the work of these women writers alongside their male contemporaries, we gain a richer and more complex understanding of how poets evaluated the boundaries between verbal expression and visual composition. In line with my aim to offer a more nuanced historical account of the sister arts by including the contributions of women writers, I also examine the gendered conventions of this tradition. In my first chapter, I contend that poetry written by Anne Killigrew and Anne Finch calls into question common critical assumptions about the power dynamics of ekphrasis (the verbal description of visual art). The second chapter explores how Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, and Amelia Opie respond to the influential model for verse epistles on the sister arts established by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, which assumes that poets and artists are male while the muses and objects of representation are female. In the third chapter, I argue that concepts derived from visual art animate the elegiac practices of Thomas Gray and Anna Seward, as they explore how acts of gazing can manifest same-sex desire. My final chapter shows how the concept of fancy, represented either as a mental creative process contrasted with imagination or as a personified female figure, comes to be associated with both visual power and femininity. I trace this poetics of fancy from essays by John Locke and Joseph Addison to Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, the odes of William Collins, the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake. The qualities that lead some writers to denigrate fancy—its association with femininity rather than masculinity, dreams rather than reality, and temptation or liberation rather than constraint—are precisely the same qualities that lead the major pictorial poets to seek to internalize it. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

This dissertation explores how in the mid-nineteenth-century, the outline, an element in art, became a symbolic form for the relationship between the individual and society. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites either blurred or overstressed their outlines to highlight tensions in the ideal of the liberal individual. Writers like Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot responded with their own experiments in characterization and plot. In attending to the conceptual analogies between the outline of figures in art, the outline of literary character, and the outline of the individual in society, I explore the gradual decline of the cultural narrative of personal development and the waning of the belief in the ability to individuate in an ever-burgeoning society. Because of the ease with which the outline’s symbolic meaning traverses the boundaries of painting, literature, and lived experience, it fosters a verbal-visual vocabulary for experiencing sociality to which the visually literate Victorians were intuitively attuned. Chapter one surveys the debate about outline, tracing a line from Blake to Ruskin. Focusing on outlines in Turner’s Snow-Storm and Millais’s Isabella, I demonstrate painting’s ability to formally articulate social critique. The following chapters explore some ways in which texts experiment with outline: diffusion, evasion, and superimposition. For instance, in In Memoriam A.H.H., rather than regain a distinguishable selfhood after loss, Tennyson gradually blends his own self with the selves that surround him, in line with Turner’s aerial perspective. In Villette, Brontë draws on her experience as a failed artist and her reading of Ruskin’s Modern Painters to fashion a uniquely feminine method of characterization, which I call negative space. She defines Lucy Snowe by filling in the space around her, leaving her to come out in relief. Finally, inspired by the photographic technique of double-exposure, Middlemarch develops characters by superimposing their identities upon one another, so that their outlines can no longer protect their illusion of singularity. Middlemarch shows how the most superficial social impulse of projecting our own preconceived notions onto our neighbors, can actually enrich rather than diminish their identities, and thus help to develop society as a whole. / 2027-03-31T00:00:00Z