Search results for ""author sarah blackwood""

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces became understood as expressions of human depth during this era. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and in-depth archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Considering painting, photography, illustration, and other visual forms alongside literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing, Blackwood argues that portraiture was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology.Blackwood reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that ultimately reconfigured the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.

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Wharton's sly and delicious novel about the ambitious social ascent of Undine Spragg, with a foreword bySofia CoppolaConsidered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton's second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the journey of Undine Spragg from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of the America's interior and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through the intricate plot of Undine's marriages and affairs, Wharton conveys a vision of a social class that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted.

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