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• 3 • Film form and aesthetics This chapter offers an introduction to film analysis. Although this work emphasises the importance of film as a cultural and historical object, it is crucial to recognise the textual specificity of film. As the work is partly aimed at those who may not have studied film before, this chapter will outline how to explore visual style and will draw attention to how this is constructed through lighting, staging, performance, camerawork, costumes and music. The focus here is film and, while the examples are predominantly drawn from
in mediating new lands, people and places to European travellers and their readers in Britain. But what was the picturesque; what impact did it have and did this stretch beyond the realm of aesthetics and art into those of politics and society? 5 One thing that was generally agreed upon was the pre-eminence of viewing, visualisation and the visual in the construction and mediation of the
The need for a single public culture - the creation of an authentic identity - is fundamental to our understanding of nationalism and nationhood. This book considers how manufactured cultural identities are expressed. It explores how notions of Britishness were constructed and promoted through architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature, and the ways in which the aesthetics of national identities promoted the idea of nation. The idea encompassed the doctrine of popular freedom and liberty from external constraint. Particular attention is paid to the political and social contexts of national identities within the British Isles; the export, adoption and creation of new identities; and the role of gender in the forging of those identities. The book examines the politics of land-ownership as played out within the arena of the oppositional forces of the Irish Catholics and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. It reviews the construction of a modern British imperial identity as seen in the 1903 durbar exhibition of Indian art. The area where national projection was particularly directed was in the architecture and the displays of the national pavilions designed for international exhibitions. Discussions include the impact of Robert Bowyer's project on the evolution of history painting through his re-representation of English history; the country houses with architectural styles ranging from Gothic to Greek Revivalist; and the place of Arthurian myth in British culture. The book is an important addition to the field of postcolonial studies as it looks at how British identity creation affected those living in England.
The first part of this article focuses on previously unstudied materials relating to the critical recuperation of William Blake in the period between c.1910 and 1930. It notes how commentators utilised ideas of citizenship and hospitality when they attempted to modernise Blake’s interests and concerns. It explains how these distinctive critical idioms were constructed, what they had in common and how they situated Blake in larger public arguments about the social significance of cultural creativity. The second part of the article traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking about Blake by noting his appearance in modernist and neo-romantic art criticism in the 1930s and 1940s.
This book carefully considers the myriad and complex relationships between queer male masculinity and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957 - that is bachelors of a different sort - through rich, well-chosen case studies. It pays close attention to particular homes and domestic interiors of Lord Ronald Gower, Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton. The book underscores the discursive history and conceptual parameters of the bachelor as these collided with queer sexualities through social and cultural perceptions. It focuses on the seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor: queerness, idolatry, decadence, askesis, decoration, glamour, and finally, artifice. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor comprise a contested site freighted with contradiction, vacillating between and revealing the fraught and distinctly queer twining of shame and resistance. Together the furniture and collections that filled Gower's Windsor home compel us to search out the narratives that bric-a-brac at once enliven and expose well beyond the shadows of the endless and meaningless accumulation that late Victorians were said to been have afflicted by.
The need for a single public culture – the creation of an authentic identity – is fundamental to our understanding of nationalism and nationhood. How are these manufactured cultural identities expressed? This book considers those questions in relation to the ways in which the aesthetics of national identities promoted the idea of nation that encompassed the doctrine of
power to move and charm, the particular confluence of politics, science and aesthetics that brought it into being is gone, never to return. Notes 1 Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe: A Biography (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), p. 27. 2 Ibid. See also Carol Sicherman
of bellies’, the last section, ‘Visualising the viscera’, focuses on drawings, engravings and caricatures which used the bowels, 12 Introduction viscera and entrails to articulate political protest, Revolutionary tensions and subversion through scatological aesthetics, or to expose those invisible organs. Barbara Stentz examines the ‘iconography of the belly’, whose protuberant lines were increasingly deployed in Revolutionary satire to depict the excesses and corruption of both the clergy and the aristocracy. Caricature reacted against the smooth lines of
machine ‘energy shards’ and ‘force lines’, he transformed mechanical aesthetics, melding geometry and physics and translating abstract art into a natural world governed by physical laws. Depero reconfigured fauna and flora into structures and machines, a modern version of Del Monte’s intertwining of ‘speculation’ and ‘manufacture’.9 Depero thus needs to be reassessed as an inbetweener straddling across a variety of modes of production, both outmoded and new. Balibar’s assertion that ‘periods of transition are […] characterised by the coexistence of several modes of
bring together in its analysis of housing and policy. The chapter opens by identifying why the language and problems of aesthetics and design were so important to social policy discourse from the 1890s onwards. The next section addresses the transformation of the political and architectural issue of housing from being a vaguely formulated ‘question’ in the 1890s, to being a ‘policy’ in the 1920s. Central here is how the ‘home’ was conceived of, described and investigated, because one cannot formulate a policy M1054 JERRAM TEXT M/UP.qxd:Andy Q7.3 18/10/07 10