This thesis centers around three pianos designed and/or decorated by the Victorian artist Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: the Priestley Piano, the Graham Piano, and the Ionides Piano. I read and interpret the Burne-Jones pianos not only as examples of the artist’s exploration of the boundaries of visual art and music, but also as reflections of the Victorian era female gender performance. Their physical forms and decorations, both designed and executed by Burne-Jones, enhance the piano as an instrument and accentuate their respective female performers. The music emanating from these pianos and the domestic space in which they inhabit prompt and contribute to the Victorian female performance of gender.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T21:16:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 28 / Nenhuma / A dimensão estética como indispensável para fazer diferença no mundo e, em especial, nos processos educativos – eis a idéia básica defendida ao longo deste trabalho. Argumenta-se que uma experiência estética só é possível em escola que considera as crianças como atores sociais, protagonistas da história, sujeitos produtores de culturas. Nesta perspectiva, a pesquisa investiga marcas que permaneceram na memória de um grupo de ex-alunos - hoje jovens em torno de vinte e poucos anos - ao relembrar seus tempos de infância vividos numa determinada instituição educativa, o Centro Educacional Monteiro Lobato, de Viçosa, Minas Gerais, nas décadas de 80/90 do último século. A base empírica, derivada de procedimentos operacionais processados via internet, evidencia como alunos e alunas que passaram por esta escola, que tinha como foco “educar com arte”, restauram suas memórias reconstituindo um percurso marcado por experiências de estesia. A autora, partindo de suas próprias memórias de tempos idos, desdobra referencia / The essential aestheticism dimension in order to make the difference in the world and in special, in the educational processes is the basic idea stood up for this research. It is commented that an aestheticism experience is only possible at a school that considers children as social actors, story protagonists and people who produce cultures. In this perspective, the research investigates marks that remain in the memory of a group of ex-students when they recall their childhood times lived in a certain educative institution called Centro Educacional Monteiro Lobato that is located in Viçosa, Minas Gerais during the decades of 80/90 from the last century. Today, these ex-students are young people in at about twenty years old. The empirical base originated from operational proceedings processed by Internet proves as the students who passed for this school, that was focused in "educate with art", recovered their memories reconstructing a route made by experiences. The author based in her own memories regarding to

In nineteenth-century literary studies and histories, Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) is still largely remembered as the instigator of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake, mostly because of his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and its controversial preface. This recognition is usually accompanied by a retrospective appreciation of Gautier's work in light of the more famous authors who succeeded him and developed some of the precepts of the doctrine, such as Baudelaire. This thesis is a comparative study of Gautier and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) as the two main exponents of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake respectively in France and Britain. While comparisons between Gautier and Baudelaire have tended to highlight the superiority of the latter, a comparison with Wilde allows Gautier to be seen and understood in his own terms, and simultaneously casts a new light on Wilde's contribution to the development of the doctrine. My study is the first to examine the works of the two authors comparatively from the vantage point of their aesthetic theories. I argue that in order better to assess their contribution, it is necessary to start with an analysis of their experimentations with literary form. The overall aim of the thesis is to re-evaluate their fictional works which, as a result of their commitment to the doctrine, are often seen as lacking in depth and content, and as being too descriptive and decorative. The central argument is that the very decorative form of their works should be seen as the starting point of an ambitious reflection on literature, its aims and its relation to other artistic media, the visual arts in particular.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the theoretical views underlying Karl Vennberg's literary criticism, and then to use these views as a starting point for a study of his poetry. Thus, the book is largely divided into two parts. The first deals with Vennberg's reviews and essays, the second with his poetry. As a critic and a modernist poet, Vennberg defends the autonomy of literature, but not from the organicist or aestheticising viewpoint common to post-romantic poetics. Instead, he brings to the fore another part of the heritage from romantic literary theory: the view of literature as ironic, critical and endlessly open. In his concept of irony as an endlessly ambiguous negativity, we encounter an understanding of literature that permeates all of his work. Poetry is, thus, defined by him as a freedom in relation to everything decided - a critical, destructive force that questions ingrained ideas, concepts and ideologies in the name of nothing more than negation. This theoretical stand also characterises Vennberg's relation to mysticism. He obviously feels affiliated to it's negative, critical side, it's via negativa, but does not accept the dialectics through which it reappropriates negativity into religious belief. The final part of the dissertation consists of close readings of specific poems, brought into relief by the theoretical context found in Vennberg's critical writings.

<p>My twofold aim with this essay is, firstly, to examine the ideas about art expressed in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by the Victorian author Oscar Wilde. Secondly, I analyse how Oscar Wilde has implemented the philosophy of aestheticism throughout his novel. I achieve this by discussing the novel from the perspectives of the arts of painting, acting and literature. I examine the ideas expressed through the three main characters Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton. I give occurrences of alliteration, epigrams and theatrical traits of the novel as examples of how the novel in itself is a beautiful work of art. With this essay I wish to highlight the need for all types of art mentioned in The Picture of Dorian Gray to be included in any discussion about art in the novel. My thesis statement is that the philosophy of aestheticism is promoted throughout the novel. This philosophy states that art should only be seen as something beautiful. Art should not be expected to teach its audience any moral lessons. The over-all conclusion is that it is indeed the philosophy of aestheticism that is promoted in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the ideal of male beauty in particular.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 400-412). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This study compares the relation between beauty, objectification, and transcendence in two novels: Oscar Wilde's early-modernist The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Vladimir Nabokov's late-modernist Pale Fire (1962). Though written over half a century apart, the works feature similar critiques of the aesthete's devotion to beauty. While Wilde's novel offers an insider's view of aristocratic Decadence in late-nineteenth-century London, Nabokov's reflects his early influence from the Russian Symbolists and recalls that tradition in the American suburbs of the mid-twentieth-century. Both novels demonstrate the trust that many modernists held in the ability of beauty to offer transcendence over the limits and suffering of mortal life. Yet they also call attention to the dangers of aesthetic obsession. My study applies the theories of Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Vladimir Solovyov, Laura Mulvey, and Steven Drukman to the aesthetic sensibilities presented in the novels. To understand how these ideologies inform the works, I have divided the main characters into three categories---artist, spectator, and aesthetic object. Both Wilde and Nabokov present beauty as a positive force for its ability to provide at least temporary transcendence. The authors also, however, portray the tragic consequences of aesthetic objectification. By comparing the two works, I conclude that both highlight the dangers of the aesthete's obsession with beauty, but only Nabokov's Pale Fire offers a solution: the need for pity toward those who become the objects of the aesthetic gaze.

This is a study of what I argue is a neglected side of Aestheticism. A standard definition of Aestheticism is that its practitioners turn away from the general current of modernity to protest its utilitarian and materialistic values, but this generalization ignores the profound influence of contemporary philosophical and scientific thought on such major figures of British Aestheticism as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. This study focuses on Aesthetes who are not in flight from modernity. I call their type of Aestheticism "Epicurean Aestheticism" and argue that since this temperament is characterized by a willingness to engage with the flux of modern times it must be distinguished from the more familiar, escapist form of Aestheticism I call "Platonic Aestheticism." I propose that Aestheticism be viewed as a spectrum with Epicurean Aestheticism on one side and the Platonic variety on the other. While Platonic Aesthetes like W. B . Yeats and Stephane Mallarme continue the Romantic project of trying to counter modernity with various idealist and absolutist philosophies, Epicurean Aesthetes adopt materialist and relativistic strategies in their desire to make the most of modern life. I argue that the first unmistakable signs of Epicurean Aestheticism are to be found in Thomas De Quincey, that the sensibility is fully formulated be Pater, continued by Wilde, and finds a current representative in Tom Stoppard. All Aesthetes are dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, but Platonic Aesthetes seek beauty in an eternal and transcendent realm, while Epicurean Aesthetes have given up such absolutist habits of thought. Pater writes: "Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the "relative" spirit in place of the "absolute." Epicurean Aesthetes want a new aesthetic that will parallel the paradigm shift from absolutism to relativism. While a nostalgic, quasi-religious longing for a purely ideal realm characterizes Platonic Aesthetes, Epicurean Aesthetes accept that the high, idealistic road to eternal beauty is closed. Instead of lamenting this fact, they start looking for beauty among the uncertainties of the phenomenal world: by viewing life as an aesthetic spectacle to be observed and experimented on with playful detachment they become Epicureans of the flux of modernity.

By examining the process of production and reception of the works of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, this thesis explores the ways in which both conceptions of audience and actual audiences shaped these works. As proponents of "aestheticism," a philosophy which required the development of a highly specialised mode of perception and critical awareness, Pater and Wilde wrote with a fairly select audience in mind. Confronted, however, with actual readers who did not always meet the "aesthetic" criteria (even if they were supporters), they were forced to rethink their conceptions of audience. Pater's and Wilde's developing understandings of audience can be traced in their works, as they experiment with style and genre in an attempt to communicate effectively with their readers. Although at base Pater and Wilde advocated a similar "aesthetic" philosophy, their distinct conceptions of audience played a significant role in determining the nature of their particular versions of aestheticism.

This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.