{"product_id":"cultivating-victorians-liberal-culture-and-the-aesthetic-hardback-9780812237542","title":"Cultivating Victorians; Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Hardback) 9780812237542","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eCultivating Victorians\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eLiberal Culture and the Aesthetic\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eDavid Wayne Thomas (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780812237542\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eHardback, published 21 January 2004\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e248 pages, 3 illus.\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\"Some of the most innovative and exciting work on aestheticism that I have read in a long time, \u003ci\u003eCultivating Victorians\u003c\/i\u003e moves fluidly between specific circumstances of the crisis in liberalism after the Second Reform Bill and twenty-first-century critical debates about agency and liberalism. This is Victorian cultural studies at its best.\" (Kathy Alexis Psomiades, University of Notre Dame) \"This is a volume of extraordinary intelligence, which will be eagerly read, discussed, and quarreled with by a wide range of scholars.\" (James Eli Adams, Cornell University) \"This is a challenging volume, in the ambition of its arguments, the breadth of the material discussed, and the rnage of theoretical perspectives deployed. Its strengths like in the scope and sensitivity of its consideration of the interrelationships between aesthetic and liberal culture in the Victorian period.\" (\u003ci\u003eHistory\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this provocative and historically detailed reading of the relations between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism, David Wayne Thomas challenges current critical assumptions concerning modern liberal agency and aesthetic experience more generally. Through meticulous examinations of literature, visual arts, popular culture, and politics, \u003ci\u003eCultivating Victorians\u003c\/i\u003e shows how a mid-Victorian liberal discourse of individual \"many-sidedness\"-understood as a cultivated disposition toward self-criticism and open-mindedness-was taken up by artists and writers as they claimed for art a self-reflecting agency at the core of the liberal ideal. Thomas makes plain, as well, the ongoing but often repressed stake of latter-day critics in the aesthetics of many-sidedness.\u003cbr\u003e As Thomas shows, an increasingly dominant mid-Victorian liberal culture employed its rhetoric of cultivation in projects as varied as aesthetic appreciation, self-improvement, and social amelioration. By looking to topics across both elite and popular culture, Thomas demonstrates how this liberal culture had to take shape in competition with other dimensions of Victorian public life. Thus several uncommon but illuminating contexts come under inspection here: the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant, a low-born imposter claiming a noble inheritance; the reportage on life-scale historical city replicas fashioned for temporary public exhibitions in the 1880s; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of producing and reproducing his artwork for a newly constituted consumer market. Thomas also reads extensively in notable Victorian intellectuals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde.\u003cbr\u003e Theoretically inventive, engagingly written, and vividly illustrated, \u003ci\u003eCultivating Victorians\u003c\/i\u003e is a timely invitation to rethink liberal values-like autonomy and reflective judgment-that have been routinely condemned as atomistic individualism and false universalism in recent decades.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eList of Illustrations\u003cbr\u003e Preface\u003cbr\u003e PART I. VICTORIAN LIBERAL CULTURE\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 1. Cultivating Victorians\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 2. Reflections of Agency in Ruskin's Venice\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 3. The Work of Imposture: The Victorian Public and the Tichborne Case\u003cbr\u003e PART II. AESTHETIC AGENCY\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 4. Replicating Agency: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Victorian Manchester\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 5. Against Originality: Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic Agency\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Index\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"University of Pennsylvania Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52555707646232,"sku":"9780812237542","price":44.46,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/cultivating-victorians-liberal-culture-and-the-aesthetic-hardback-9780812237542","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}