The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics

Abstract

It seems remarkable that Rachel Teukolsky can suggest, as she does in her introduction, that her book is the first to look at ‘the cultural history of aesthetic judgements’ (p. 5) in the Victorian period, the first history, in effect, of Victorian art writing. Nineteenth-century British art has been well served by the social turn in art history – one thinks of recent works by Tim Barringer and Lynda Nead that are attentive to the mediation of visual works. Victorian art has also received substantial attention from literary scholars, including J. B. Bullen, Linda Dowling, and Kate Flint, who have paid particular attention to writing about art, as one would expect. And art historians, sociologists, and philosophers have increasingly collaborated on the production of a long-overdue historiography of art history, including its institutions, of which art criticism is one. Yet Teukolsky is right. While there are institutional studies (notably of the nineteenth-century museum), works on canonical critics (especially Ruskin and Pater), and analyses of Victorian visual culture more broadly, there has been, until now, no work to which one could turn for a history of the emergence and development of art criticism in nineteenth-century Britain, certainly not one that took account of debates in the popular and mass media as well as those in philosophical treatises. This book is, therefore, a valuable and timely work.