Victorian Modernism
Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism.

Jessica R. Feldman (Author)

9780521120906, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 October 2009

276 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.41 kg

"Deft and winning." Studies in English Literature

In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. She examines aesthetic sites of Victorian Modernism - including workrooms, parlours, friendships, and family relations as well as printed texts and paintings - as they develop through interminglings and continuities as well as gaps and breaks. Examining the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist) and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations. She reveals these sentimental, domestic and sublime works to be pragmatist explorations of aesthetic realms. This study, which leads Modernism back into the Victorian age, will be of interest to scholars of literature, art history and philosophy.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. A sweet continuance: John Ruskin's Victorian Modernism
3. Arrangements: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Victorian Modernism
4. Recondite analogies: Augusta Evans' Victorian Modernism
5. Positions of repose: William James' Victorian Modernism
6. Afterword
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]