The Arts and Crafts Movement began in England in the 1880s, flourished in Britain and elsewhere until the First World War, and has had an enduring impact worldwide on design and craft practice. This book is the first to chart the development of the Movement through a range of writings, most of which are long out of print or unpublished. The anthology includes contributions from many of the key practitioners of the Movement as well as from commentators in newspapers and journals. It provides both an introduction to the ideas behind the Arts and Crafts Movement in England in its own words and a vivid picture of the people and events which shaped the Movement.

A comprehensive presentation of the provocative, modernist graphic works of Britain's creator of Art Nouveau. This is the first book to bring together the recorded works of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley. Despite his early death from tuberculosis in 1898, at the age of 25, these amount to nearly 1100 completed works of art (plus many related sketches) as well as more than 100 sketches in his letters and the books he owned, and this book includes over 50 that have never previously been published. In his brief career Beardsley made a defining contribution to Art Nouveau in Britain and abroad. He also influenced the early history of modern art, attracting the attention of the young Picasso, for example. His distinctive and innovatory graphic style, combined with highly provocative, often sexual subject matter, outraged critics and led to a period of intense notoriety. Beardsley's drawings span the grotesque, the delicately beautiful, the subtly erotic, and the frankly bawdy, and challenged the moral norms of Victorian society. They enthralled artists and art lovers the world over and continue to enthral today. Linda Gertner Zatlin's text presents Beardsley's drawings with a full record of their making, provenance, exhibition history and references in the art historical literature. This material record is accompanied by often extensive discussions of their themes, motifs and symbolism, as well as their critical reception. Unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness, this study presents Beardsley's work and explores its meanings more comprehensively than any previous work on him; it is likely to remain definitive. This superbly illustrated two volume catalogue, beautifully presented as a boxed set, is both an essential reference for specialists and an accessible and enchanting delight for Beardsley enthusiasts. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Leaving the traditional focus on Arthurian romance and Gothic tales, the essays in this collection address how the Victorians looked back to the Middle Ages to create a sense of authority for their own ideas in areas such as art, religion, gender expectations, and social services. This book will interest specialists in the Victorian period from various fields and will also be a welcome addition to any library serving substantial humanities divisions. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the essays, this collection would be useful in a wide range of humanities classes beyond the traditional literature class.

The revival of interest in Arthurian literature in the early part of the 19th century has been largely unremarked until now. Roger Simpson's wide-ranging study of this period, in which he traces the dominant forms adopted by the Arthurian revival and presents a wealth of new material, shows it to have been of critical importance in the development of the legend and to have been a powerful early influence on Tennyson, whose role within the Arthurian revival is accordingly reassessed. His book also contains a complete bibliography of early 19th-century Arthurian poetry, drama and prose fiction, together with catalogues of paintings and illustrated books. ROGER SIMPSON is Director, Centre for Overseas Student Programmes, at the University of East Anglia.

In this ground-breaking book, Alison Milbank explains why a comprehension of the Victorian reception of Dante is essential for a full understanding of Victorianism as a whole. Her focus on this much-neglected topic allows her to reconfigure the British nineteenth-century understanding of history, nationalism, aesthetics and gender, and their often strange intersections. The account also builds towards a demonstration that the modernist perpetuation of the Dante obsession reveals an equal continuity with many aspects of Victorianism. The book provides not only an authoritative introduction to these important cultural themes, but also a re-reading of the genealogy of literature in the modern period. Instead of the Victorian realism challenged by Modernist symbolism's attempts to transcend linear time, Milbank offers us a contrary, continuous 'Danteism'. For both the Victorians and the Modernists Dante is the first writer to historicise, fictionalise and humanise the eternal role, and he becomes paradoxically the means by which history, secularised fiction and a positivist humanism could be reconnected to a lost transcendent. Dante and the Victorians provides the first comprehensive account of why the reading of Dante was central to nineteenth-century British language and culture.

An investigation of Scott, Cabbet, Carlyle, Disraeli, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Adam's work with respect to their treatment of aspects of the Middle Ages.

During the last two decades, numerous studies have been devoted to the Victorian fascination with King Arthur, however . the figure of King Alfred has received almost no attention. For much of the nineteenth century, Alfred was as important as Arthur in the British popular imagination. A pervasive cult of the king developed which included the erection of at least four public statues, the completion of more than twenty-five paintings, and the publication of over a hundred texts, by authors ranging from Wordsworth to minor women writers. By 1852, J.A. Froude could describe Alfred's life as 'the favourite story in English nurseries'; in 1901, a national holiday marked the thousandth anniversary of his death, organised by a committee including Edward Burne Jones, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hughes. England's darling sets out to answer the questions that must arise in the face of such nineteenth-century enthusiasm for a long-dead king. It addresses a genuine gap in the literature on Victorian medievalism in particular and cultural history in general and argues that knowledge of the cult of Alfred is crucial to understanding the Victorian cultural map. The book examines the ways in which Alfred was rewritten by nineteenth-century authors and artists, and asks how beliefs about the Saxon king's reign and achievements related to nineteenth-century ideals about leadership, law, religion, commerce, education and the Empire. The book concludes by addressing the most interesting enigma in Alfred's reception history: why is the king no longer 'England's darling'? A fascinating study that will be enjoyed by scholars of history, cultural history, literature and art history.

In George Eliot's last two novels, Middlemarch(1871-72) and Daniel Deronda(1876), she abandons the realism she had explored and articulated so carefully, most famously in Adam Bede, 'a faithful account of men and things', for an unprecedented return to 'cloud-borne angels, [...] prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors'. This study addresses Eliot's exploitation of Victorian medievalism by considering the way in which she utilizes the discourses of medievalism, both for their potential for subversiveness and their potential for mediation, to affirm that change is possible socially, culturally, and politically, in her modern contemporary world. The various medieval discourses are revealed as interstices within what initially appears to be a continuation of the realism of her earlier novels. They permit political and cultural readings of a different, and often unexpected, kind to the realist bourgeois values of novels like Adam Bede, and to a lesser extent, Felix Holt. These political and cultural readings reveal a more determined, more obvious feminist and socialist polemic in her two last and possibly greatest novels.

This book, first published in 2000, discusses the attitudes towards Anglo-Saxons expressed by English poets, playwrights and novelists from the thirteenth century to the present day. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing literary responses to the Anglo-Saxons in the medieval period, the Renaissance and also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In earlier centuries the Ango-Saxons were often idealized representatives of happier times. Later, they became the epitome of a 'British' race, while an individual Anglo-Saxon, King Alfred, was inflated into a national hero. A final essay suggests the disappearance of any clear sense of the cultural roots of the English in the twentieth century. The contributors, who are specialists in their respective fields from Britain and the United States, draw on works that have frequently been ignored or overlooked. They address topical issues such as nationalism, cultural identity, myth, gender and contextualization.

The importance of David Jones (1895-1974) as a major modern poet has been increasingly recognized during the past few decades through a growing critical appreciation of ""In Parenthesis"" (1937), ""The Anathemata"" (1952), and ""The Sleeping Lord"" (1974). Praised by poets as diverse as T.S. Eliot, W.H.Auden, Hugh MacDiarmid, Seamus Heaney, and W.S. Merwin, Jones is a writer whose work challenges established critical boundaries between periods, styles, and genres. In ""Making the Past Present,"" Paul Robichaud offers an innovative exploration of Jones' poetry that aims to help readers overcome challenges to a fuller appreciation of his work. A persistent challenge for readers has been Jones' turn to the Middle Ages for inspiration and example. Although Jones' medievalism has hindered his acceptance into the academic modernist canon, the Middle Ages are central to his modernism as a continually questioned and constructed source of cultural values. ""Making the Past Present"" explores the significance of Jones' medievalism in its modernist contexts, while providing readers with detailed information on central, but often unfamiliar, allusions. Robichaud charts the growth of Jones' medievalism from his earliest Pre-Raphaelite influences, showing how his commitment to modernist aesthetics transformed his vision of the Middle Ages. In considering his obsession with medieval Wales, this study shows how Jones engaged with contemporary Welsh and Arthurian scholarship to construct a vision of Wales that is both a modernist symbol of cultural wholeness and an ""imagined community"" in tandem with the development of Welsh cultural nationalism. Robichaud argues that the tension between vernacular and Latin cultures in Jones' poetry reflects his concern over the modern relationship between national and European cultural interests, an intellectual context shared with T.S. Eliot and the historian Christopher Dawson. The impact of medieval on modernist aesthetics receives a sustained analysis in a reading of Jones in relation to James Joyce, Jacques Maritain, and Wilhelm Worringer.

Since the inclusion of medieval studies in the modern academy, professional scholars have insisted on distinguishing their work from extra-academic lovers of medieval culture. Richard Utz analyzes the semantic, institutional, and sociopolitical history of the relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. He provides a survey of how scholars' exteriorization of amateur interest in the medieval past narrowed the epistemological range of medieval scholarship and how reception studies, feminism, and postmodernism gradually expanded modern pastist approaches to the Middle Ages. Utz advances specific examples for reconnecting investigating scholarly subjects with their subjects of investigation, and he challenges scholars to make a conscious effort to engage in public scholarship and explore inclusive gestures toward the contributions non-academic lovers of the Middle Ages can offer. His manifesto advocates an active integration of academic medievalists' work within the many other equally valuable artistic and sociopolitical partner contexts of reading the medieval past.

This groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England—from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and Tennyson to Pound, Tolkien, and Rowling.

This study examines the complex nature of nineteenth-century British national identity through the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood, two very different national heroes. It examines a variety of issues, including the rise of Englishness over the course of the nineteenth century, race, gender and imperialism.

In 1859, the historian Lord John Acton asserted: "two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages". The influence on Victorian culture of the "Middle Ages" (broadly understood then as the centuries between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance)was both pervasive and multi-faceted. This "medievalism" led, for instance, to the rituals and ornament of the Medieval Catholic church being reintroduced to Anglicanism. It led to the Saxon Witan being celebrated as a prototypical representative parliament. It resulted in Viking raiders beingacclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy. And it encouraged innumerable nineteenth-century men to cultivate the superlative beards we now think of as typically "Victorian" - in an attempt to emulate their Anglo-Saxon forefathers.Different facets of medieval life, and different periods before the Renaissance, were utilized in nineteenth-century Britain for divergent political and cultural agendas. Medievalism also became a dominant mode in Victorian art and architecture, with 75 per cent of churches in England built on aGothic rather than a classical model. And it was pervasive in a wide variety of literary forms, from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse to triple-decker novels. Medievalism even transformed nineteenth-century domesticity: while only a minority added moats and portcullises to theirhomes, the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris and Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism is the first work to examine in full the fascinating phenomenon of "medievalism" in Victorian Britain. Covering art, architecture, religion, literature,politics, music, and social reform, the Handbook also surveys earlier forms of antiquarianism that established the groundwork for Victorian movements. In addition, this collection addresses the international context, by mapping the spread of medievalism across Europe, South America, and India,amongst other places.

Through the consideration of canonical authors such as Blake, Scott, and Wordsworth and of lesser-studied works such as radical press writings and popular drama, this study explores the imaginative appeal of the social structures and literary forms of the Middle Ages, and how they raised awareness of Britain's tradition of freedom.

The common thread that joins the essays in this volume is drawn from the rich tapestry of pre-Raphaelite art and literature and its medieval legacy. This edition presents an interdisciplinary view of the interpretation of pre-Raphaelite art and literature. The current intensifying interest in the relationship between the visual arts and narrative and their critical interpretation justifies a look at the earliest use of such orientation in the works of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its followers. Particularly in the work of Rossetti, Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones one can see at work the pre-Raphaelist invention of a personal symbolic language.

In her systematic reassessment of the remaking of the Arthurian past in nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction, Inga Bryden examines the Victorian Arthurian revival as a cultural phenomenon, offering insights into the relationship between social, cultural, religious, and ethnographic debates of the period and a wide range of texts. Throughout, she adopts an intertextual and historical perspective, informed by poststructuralist thinking, to reveal nineteenth-century attitudes towards the past. Starting with a review of the historical evidence available to Victorian writers and an examination of how historians of the time represented Arthur, the author connects Victorian accounts of Arthur's quest to contemporary scientific and historical searches for origins and knowledge, and to his appropriation by competing religious movements. She shows how writers explored the dynamics of heroism by recruiting Arthur and his knights to define codes of chivalric service, and to personify the psychological complexities of love. Finally, the legend of his death and transportation to Avalon is deconstructed and placed in the context of cultural attitudes towards commemorating the dead and theological debates about the afterlife. Inga Bryden engages not only with well-known Arthurian texts by Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris and Rossetti, but with lesser-known works by Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Stephen Hawker, Sebastian Evans, Diana Maria Mulock, Christiana Douglas and Joseph Shorthouse.

The fourteen essays presented in this volume contribute substantially to the study of the reinvention of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They take an historicized approach to constructions of the past, and most address the relatively new field of Medievalism. All of them focus on how and why the present of any period uses the past to promote its own opinions, beliefs, doctrines or views. In particular, the volume demonstrates that reinventions of past eras or figures can be motivated by a nationalistic desire to create cultural 'roots', to discover origins that justify a regime or group's self-identity, to appropriate a cultural icon or neglected author for a particular political agenda, or to reflect on contemporary social issues via a remote time and place. Reworkings or adaptations of earlier culture often tell us more about the age in which they were produced than the one revived or revisited. This volume features five essays that treat medieval subjects; four focus on Tudor and Stuart figures, religion or politics; and five concentrate on nineteenth-century uses of medieval or early modern events, literary conventions, settings and themes.

Girouard studies the role of medievalism and knighthood in Victorian ideals of the English gentleman.

The only figure in the Dictionary of National Biography who is said never to have existed, Robin Hood has taken on an air of reality few historical figures achieve. His image in various guises has been put to use as a subject of ballads, nationalist rallying point, Disney cartoon fox, greenclad figure of farce, tabloid fodder, and template for petty criminals and progressive political candidates alike. In this engaging and deeply informed book Stephen Knight looks at the different manifestations of Robin Hood at different times and places in a mythic biography with a thematic structure. The best way to get at the essence of the Robin Hood myth, Knight believes, is in terms not of chronological and generic progression but of the purposes served by heroes. Each of the book's four central chapters identifies a particular model of the hero, mythic or biographic, which dominated in certain periods and in certain genres, and explores their interrelations, their implications, and their historical and sociopolitical contexts.

This collection of essays on the Robin Hood tradition explores both its medieval contexts and the evolution of the legend after the medieval period. They deal with Robin Hood in literature and drama, with local traditions, monuments and forgeries, with folkloric connections, and with the changing perspectives of antiquarian and modern studies of the Robin Hood material. Contents: Helen Phillips, Studying Robin Hood; Douglas Gray, Everybody's Robin Hood; Derek Pearsall, Little John and the ballad of Robin Hood and the Monk; Richard Firth Green, The hermit and the outlaw: new evidence for Robin Hood's death?; Roy Pearcy, The literary Robin Hood: character and function in Fitts 1, 2, and 4 of the Gest of Robin Hood; Thomas H. Ohlgren, Merchant adventure in Robin Hood and the Potter; Timothy S. Jones, Tristan, Malory, and the outlaw-knight; David Hepworth, A grave tale; Liz Oakley-Brown, Framing Robin Hood: temporality and textuality in Anthony Munday's Robin Hood plays; Stephen Knight, Meere English flocks: Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd and the Robin Hood tradition; Linda Troost, The noble peasant; Helen Phillips, Robin Hood, the priories of Kirkless and Charlotte BrontÃ?Ã?«; Lois Potter, Robin Hood and the fairies: Alfred Noyes' Sherwood; Michael Evans, Robin Hood in the landscape.

Nineteenth century medievalism is usually associated with Scott's world of Ivanhoe , but Romantic Medievalism argues that Scott's is a conservative use of the past and that radical poets such as the young Coleridge, Keats and Shelley used the medieval to critique and change, rather than validate, the present. These poets identified with the troubadour of courtly love, a disempowered figure often politically at odds with the establishment figure of the knight.

This generously illustrated and exciting new study of the Victorian era features rarely seen works, provocative essays, and a striking, period-inspired design. Although the word "Victorian" connotes a kind of dry propriety, the artists working in the Victorian era were anything but. Starting with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and lasting through the dawn of the 20th century, the era's painters, writers, and designers challenged every prevailing belief about art and its purpose. The full spectrum of the Victorian avant-garde is in magnificent display in this book that features nearly 150 works drawn from the city of Birmingham's unparalleled collection. Characterized by attention to detail, vibrant colors, and engagement with literary themes and daily life, the paintings, works on paper, and decorative objects featured reveal the myriad ways Victorian artists and artisans made sense of a rapidly changing world. Perceptive essays and the latest scholarship illuminate the issues these artists contended with, including the relationship to art and nature, questions of class and gender identity, the value of handmade versus machine production, and the search for beauty in an age of industry. Designed to reflect the tactile nature of the work and featuring typography inspired by the Victorian era, this beautiful volume is as fresh and bold as the visionaries it celebrates. Copublished by the American Federation of Arts and DelMonico Books

In many ways the Victorians invented the Viking: the term, in its modern incarnation, is first recorded just 30 years before the young Princess Victoria's coronation, yet within 50 years it featured in the titles of dozens of poems, plays, prize essays, published lectures and parlour songs. This text discusses the Victorian fascination with the Old North; in it, Walter Scott, William Morris, Edward Elgar and Rudyard Kipling appear alongside amateur enthusiasts from Lerwick to the Isle of Wight. The material examined includes novels, poems, lectures, periodicals, philology, art and music. Andrew Warn draws this wide range of source material together to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the Viking age in 19th-century Britain.

Saunders uniquely explores how women poets, biographers, historians, and visual artists used medieval motifs, forms, and settings to enable them to comment more freely on controversial contemporary issues, such as war and gender roles.