Art as spectacle in Charlotte Brontë

These days appears the paperback edition of Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (originally released in 1998) written by Alison Byerly and published by the Cambridge University Press in the series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (No. 12).

This book confronts a significant paradox in the development of literary realism: the very novels that present themselves as purveyors and celebrants of direct, ordinary human experience also manifest an obsession with art that threatens to sabotage their Realist claims. Unlike previous studies of the role of visual art, or music, or theatre in Victorian literature, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the juxtaposition of all of these arts in the works of Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others. Alison Byerly combines close textual analysis with discussion of relevant ancillary topics to illuminate the place of different arts within nineteenth-century British culture. Her book, which also contains sixteen illustrations, represents an effort to bridge the growing gap between aesthetics and cultural studies.

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.

The book is available on print.google.com.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Charlotte_Brontë