Description
Book SynopsisIn this book, Heather McAlpine argues that emblematic strategies play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been acknowledged, and that reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an awareness of these strategies permits a new understanding of the movement’s engagements with ontology, religion, representation, and politics. The emblem is a discursive practice that promises to stabilize language in the face of doubt, making it especially interesting as a site of conflicting responses to Victorian crises of representation. Through analyses of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.C. Swinburne, and William Morris, Emblematic Strategies examines the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s common goal of conveying “truth” while highlighting differences in its adherents’ approaches to that task.
Trade Review“Heather McAlpine has […] managed to show the pivotal role emblems played in the development and emancipation of these artists’ aesthetics. For this reason, her book will be of great interest to scholars and students alike who want to have a different take on the Victorian aesthetics and a fresh insight in the literary analysis of Pre-Raphaelite illustrated and unillustrated works.” - Cezara Bobeica, University of Strasbourg, France in Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, Vol. 61 2020 pp. 345-349
Table of ContentsIllustrations 1 The Emblem and Its Victorian Contexts 1 What Is an Emblem? 2 The Development of Emblem Studies 3 The History of the Genre 4 Rhetorical and Devotional Emblems 5 The Emblem and Meditation 6 Natural and Conventional Theories of Language 7 The Cupid and Anima and Schola Cordis Traditions 8 The Victorian Context 2 “Thoughts towards Nature”: Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ 1 Pre-Raphaelite Beginnings 2 “The Child Jesus”: Normative Emblematics 3 Unillustrated Emblems 4 Floriography 5 D.G. Rossetti’s Ambivalence and Aestheticism 6 The Problems of Publication 3 “Wise upbraidings”: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Emblematics 1 Background 2 Naked Emblems in the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress Volumes 3 Emblematic Devotional Prose: Called to Be Saints and Time Flies 4 “How meet beauty?”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Emblem 1 Early Sacramentalism 2 Pre-Raphaelite Connections 3 Emblematic Language: Onomatopoetics 4 God’s Language: Hieroglyphics and the Emblem 5 “The Wreck of the Deutschland” 5 “Devious symbols”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Unorthodox Emblematics 1 Background 2 Embracing Emblematics: The PRB Period 3 “Positive Agnosticism” and Revised Works 4 Religious Doubt, Emblematic Continuities: The Later Works 6 “All are types unmeet”: Swinburne and the Limits of the Emblem 1 The Emblem: Admiration and Ambivalence 2 Emblems in Swinburne’s Art Criticism 3 Questioning Devotional Emblematics 4 Political Poetry and Rhetorical Emblematics 5 Emblematic Failure and the Sublime 7 Conclusion: What about William? 1 The Work Yet to Be Done
