Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Art and the Politics of Public Life

Lucy Hartley

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107184084
• eBook ISBN: 9781316880081
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Being Interested in Beauty
• Chapter 1 ‘Of Universal or National Interest’: Charles Eastlake, the Fine Arts Commission, and the Reform of Taste
• Chapter 2 Reconstituting Publics for Art: John Ruskin and the Appeal to Enlightened Interest
• Chapter 3 The Pleasures and Perils of Self-Interest: Calculating the Passions in Walter Pater’s Essays
• Chapter 4 Figuring the Individual in the Collective: The ‘Art-politics’ of Edward Poynter and William Morris
• Chapter 5 The Humanist Interest Old and New: John Addington Symonds and the Nature of Liberty
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index