Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature

by Alison Byerly

Overview

This book examines the representation of a variety of arts—primarily painting, theater, and music—within the work of major nineteenth-century novelists. It charts a historical progression, from Romantic poetry, through mid-century Realism, to Aestheticism, showing how authors used references to other forms of art to illuminate their own aesthetic ideals. Examining the aesthetic theory and cultural practice of different arts, Alison Byerly demonstrates the importance of artistic representation to the development of Victorian Realism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521025348
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #12
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.51(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The picturesque aesthetic and the natural art of song; 2. Masterpiece theatres: art as spectacle in William Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë; 3. George Eliot's hierarchy of representation; 4. Art works: Thomas Hardy and the labor of creation; Coda: aestheticism: the erasure of the real; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Byerly's 16 pages of bibliography reflect the considerable scholarship of the past 25 years on Victorian theatrical and musical performance, art as painting or illustration, and architecture as cultural record." Choice

"Alison Byerly's rich, stimulating, wide-ranging, and admirably compact new book raises a provocative set of questions." Australasian Victorian Studies Journal

"...makes an important contribution to the study of Victorian culture." Victorian Periodicals Review

"... a persuasive, thoroughly readable, and well-constructed book." Jennifer Green-Lewis, Victorian Studies

"...a useful and stimulating contribution to studies of the interrelations among the arts in Victorian England...All students will enjoy and, one hopes, learn something from Byerly's clear thinking and writing." Modern Philology

From the Publisher