Strangeness and Beauty: Volume 1, Ruskin to Swinburne
An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840–1910

A survey of how Romantic ideas of art and imagination were transformed by nineteenth-century writers to become the fundamental premisses of modernist aesthetics.

Eric Warner (Edited by), Graham Hough (Edited by)

9780521282901, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 April 1983

304 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.592 kg

This is a two-volume anthology of criticism of art and literature from approximately 1840 to 1910. The central purpose of the anthology is to show how Romantic ideas of art and imagination were transformed by a number of writers in the nineteenth century and became the fundamental premisses of modernist aesthetics. Volume 1 begins with the development of the Romantic idea of the artist-critic as preacher in the work of Ruskin, whose aim was very much that of this Romantic forebears, Blake and Wordsworth: to awaken humanity to a greater spiritual perception. The volume also concerns itself with the transformation of this in works such as Arthur Hallam's essay on his friend Tennyson, which is central to the writing of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and with the development of French Romanticism into the influential aesthetic movement of Symbolism in the work of Gautier and Baudelaire. The volumes comprise general introductions and introduction to individual extracts, full annotation and helpful guides to further reading.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
John Ruskin (1819–1900)
1. The education of the senses
2. Theoria
3. Art
4. Society
5. The Pre-Raphaelites
William Morris (1834–1896)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Danti Gabriel Rossetti
A. H. Hallam (1811–1833)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Theophile Gautier (1811–1872)
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
Notes
Guide to further reading.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]