Hilary Fraser – författare

Walter Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), is a landmark in Victorian intellectual and cultural history. The first book-length study of the Renaissance by a British writer, it was also described as the 'golden book' of British aestheticism by Oscar Wilde. Following its sensational debut, Pater oversaw three further editions under a new title, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The book's dynamic textual history describes, indeed precipitates, a fast-moving journey from high Victorian intellectualism towards decadence. This edition, based on the fourth edition (1893), recovers the book's exciting cultural context in its twenty-five-year evolution from periodical articles into one of the period's most influential volumes.With kaleidoscopic interests and an inquiring, speculative intelligence, Pater was steeped in the cultural and intellectual life of his age, responding creatively to what he read and saw to envisage new ways of engaging with the world. This edition reveals Pater's interests in contemporary arts and aesthetics, cutting-edge science, and emerging social sciences, and how these contributed to his radical revisioning of the history of the Renaissance. Responses to quattrocento artists are shot through with references to the art and literature of his own time; even Pater's most lyrical passages echo his reading in Victorian anthropology, psychology, and geomorphology. The Renaissance offered sensual enjoyments that transformed and re-enchanted the experience of modernity. Its arresting account of paintings, sculptures, and literature elevated intensity of experience as the goal of life while remaking the reputations of artists like Botticelli and Leonardo. This edition connects Pater's experience of Renaissance art to the temper of his own time, both directly, beginning with his first visit to Italy in 1865, and indirectly, through the work of the Pre-Raphaelites in whose circle he moved and who, like him, mediated the Renaissance to the modern world. Generously illustrated, it captures Pater's articulation of art and ideas now fundamental to western thought.

Periodicals in the Victorian era portrayed and reinforced gender notions and ideals. Indeed, the Victorian periodical press was a critical cultural site for the representation of competing gender ideologies. This is a full-length book examining masculinities and femininities as defined and interrogated in these periodicals. It investigates readers, editors, and journalists; and it considers the power of the press at home, in the domestic space, in metropolitan centres and at the margins of empire. The work is based on archival research into a wide range of publications from the 1830s to the fin de siècle; from enduring intellectual heavyweight quarterlies through more ephemeral women's and working men's magazines, to magazines for boys and girls. The study is informed by the theories and approaches of media and cultural studies and women's studies. A valuable appendix supplies information about the many periodicals of the period mentioned in the book.

This study is an important contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England which examines the religio-aesthetic theories of some central writers of the time. Dr Fraser begins with a discussion of the aesthetic dimensions of Tractarian theology and then proceeds to the orthodox certainties of Hopkins' theory of inscape, Ruskin's and Arnold's moralistic criticism of literature and the visual arts, and Pater's and Wilde's faith in a religion of art. The author identifies significant cultural and historical conditions which determined the interdependence of aesthetic and religious sensibility in the period. She argues that certain tensions in the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge - tensions between poetry and religion, rebellion and reaction, individualism and authority - continued to manifest themselves throughout the Victorian age, and as society became increasingly democratic, religion in turn became increasingly personal and secular.

Periodicals in the Victorian era portrayed and reinforced gender notions and ideals. Indeed, the Victorian periodical press was a critical cultural site for the representation of competing gender ideologies. This is a full-length book examining masculinities and femininities as defined and interrogated in these periodicals. It investigates readers, editors, and journalists; and it considers the power of the press at home, in the domestic space, in metropolitan centres and at the margins of empire. The work is based on archival research into a wide range of publications from the 1830s to the fin de siècle; from enduring intellectual heavyweight quarterlies through more ephemeral women's and working men's magazines, to magazines for boys and girls. The study is informed by the theories and approaches of media and cultural studies and women's studies. A valuable appendix supplies information about the many periodicals of the period mentioned in the book.

Providing a comprehensive survey of English prose in the 19th century, this volume draws material from a wide variety of fields including art, literary theory and criticism, biography, letters, journals, sermons, and travel reportage.

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.