Aesthetic Debates Research Articles

The Moral and Aesthetic Debate inStrange Fruit: Coexistence of Violence and Beauty in Human Nature in Works of Art

In the contemporary era, philosophers have debated the homogeneity of arts moral and aesthetic values. As far as musical works are concerned, in contrast to traditional music ethics, contemporary musical works are increasingly charaterised by the integration of aesthetic and moral values. However, it is important to note that aesthetic and moral values are not always unified and that there may be instances when there are differences and even conflicts between them. When such a conflict arises between the aesthetic and moral values of a musical work, it becomes necessary to consider how its overall artistic value should be evaluated. This paper employs a case study methodology to analyse the song Strange Fruit in depth. Discussing the formal aesthetics of the work, which has been the subject of considerable controversy due to its depiction of violence, is set against the moral value of the work, which reveals the problem of racial discrimination and prompts a deep reflection on justice in society. The conflict and balance between the two are explored in light of the claims made in the philosophy of art to date. In such instances, the value of art is profoundly affected by the conflict between moral values and aesthetic concepts.

Beyond reasonable doubt: reconsidering Neanderthal aesthetic capacity

AbstractAn aesthetic sense—a taste for the creation and/or appreciation of that which strikes one as, e.g., attractive or awesome—is often assumed to be a distinctively H. sapiens phenomenon. However, recent paleoanthropological research is revealing its archaeologically visible, deeper roots. The sensorimotor/perceptual and cognitive capacities underpinning aesthetic activities are a major focus of evolutionary aesthetics. Here we take a diachronic, evolutionary perspective and assess ongoing scepticism regarding whether, and to what extent, aesthetic capacity extends to our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it serves as a defence of the attribution of Neanderthal aesthetic capacity by marshalling archaeological data best explained by positing a Neanderthal aesthetic sense. Second, it offers an opportunity to make progress on understanding some epistemically relevant features of the wider debate in evolutionary aesthetics. First, we outline and analyse a range of distinct ‘sceptical arguments’ derived from attitudes and claims found in the literature and broader debate that aim to dial down the case for Neanderthal aesthetic capacity. We show that these arguments not only miss their target, they divert the debate away from more compelling questions. We then consider the case for protoaesthetic capacities and sensitivities in the Acheulean stone tool industry and argue that Neanderthals likely inherited the protoaesthetic package from ancient ancestors that they shared with H. sapiens. Finally, we sketch and defend a research agenda for framing Neanderthal aesthetic niche(s) beyond H. sapiens-derived standards, which we see as a priority for future archaeological, cognitive, and philosophical research. While we resist sceptical arguments and the often-implied inferiority of Neanderthals to humans, we also deny that Neanderthals and ancient humans were indistinguishable. Understanding the differences is an important goal of interpretation, and we apply this line of reasoning to the case of aesthetics.

Entropy, melody, beauty: composing with information theory

ABSTRACT Within a few years of information theory’s popularisation through the writings of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, its basic framework was adopted and adapted by a loose network of music theorists, composers, and aestheticians, for whom a core principle of information theory – that ‘the aesthetic content of music can be treated in terms of fluctuations between the two extremes of total randomness and total redundancy’ (Hiller and Isaacson 1959, 110) – became an article of faith. Although it was sometimes imagined to offer a neutral conceptual framework for thinking about artmaking or a scientific alternative to the vagueness of previous artistic discourses, information theory was necessarily embroiled in the aesthetic debates of its time. In this paper I examine the encounter between information theory and musical composition in the middle of the twentieth century, paying special attention to the question of how the reception of information-theoretical concepts among composers and theorists inflected pre-existing debates about the nature and function of music in modernity.

How Do You Solve a Problem like DALL-E 2?

Abstract The arrival of image-making generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs has been met with a broad rebuke: to many, it feels inherently wrong to regard images made using generative AI programs as artworks. I am skeptical of this sentiment, and in what follows I aim to demonstrate why. I suspect AI generated images can be considered artworks; more specifically, that generative AI programs are, in many cases, just another tool artists can use to realize their creative intent. I begin with an overview of how generative AI programs, like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, work. Then, leveraging work by Claire Anscomb, I argue that generative AI programs are a new technique of automatic image-making that affords creative agency to its users, thereby qualifying the images they create as artworks. Finally, I show many of the objections brought against AI artworks—including accusations of plagiarism and artistic devaluation—are due to the social backdrop in which we currently find them, rather than the technology itself. In the end, I aim to open the door to further aesthetic debate concerning AI generated images and art.

Fabricating enchantment: Antoine Benoist’s wax courtiers in Louis XIV’s Paris

Antoine Benoist’s Cercle royal was an exhibition of life-size wax figures on display in Louis XIV’s Paris. In the absence of extant objects from the exhibition itself, this article focuses on the corpus of sources that attest to its reception. It concentrates on the Cercle royal’s initial recognition, beginning in the 1660s, when the exhibition centred on French royalty’s courtly entourage. Alternately celebrated as vivid miracles or derided as deceitful trivialities, Benoist’s wax figures provide an informatively problematic case for considering questions of sculptural craft and the decorum of its display in this era. In tracing the discord of wax portraiture’s reception, this article demonstrates that vexed questions of artisanal stature were embedded within aesthetic debates about illusionistic verisimilitude.

Might Beauty Bolster the Moral Argument for God?

John Hare argues that Kant, in his Third Critique, offers an aesthetic argument for God’s existence that shares premises with his famous moral argument. Karl Ameriks demurs, expressing skepticism that this is so. In this paper, I stake out an intermediate position, arguing that the resources of Kant provide ingredients for an aesthetic argument, but one distinctly less than a transcendental argument for God or an entailment relation. Whether the argument is best thought of as abductive in nature, a C-inductive argument, or a Pascalian natural sign, prospects for its formulation are strong. And such an argument, for its resonances with the moral argument(s), can work well in tandem with it (them), a fact not surprising at all if Kant was right that beauty—in accordance with an ancient Greek tradition—exists in close organic relation to the good. More generally, along the way, I argue that the sea change in Kant’s studies over the last decade or so should help us see that Kant is an ally, rather than foe, to aesthetic theodicists.

Shibui Katsura: The Emergence of a Japanese Global Icon, 1921–70

Abstract “Katsura is shibui”—this persistent slogan originated in two special issues of House Beautiful published in 1960. Themed “Discover shibui” and “How to be shibui with American things,” these publications linked the image of the Katsura Detached Palace with shibui and employed this “untranslatable” word to evoke the notion of richness in simplicity. But as this article shows, Katsura’s global fame can be traced at least back to the early 1920s, when German scholars investigated the imperial villa as an example of Japanese timber construction, followed soon after by Japanese architects and critics. Shibui, in contrast, first became an aesthetic term when the Japanese government promoted it in the 1930s as part of a campaign to encourage foreign tourism. This study reconstructs the process through which a growing number of publications and international exchanges addressed these topics, culminating in the postwar period, when the initial contact between the two genealogies of Katsura and shibui sparked a heated aesthetic debate.

Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon by Alexander Stefaniak

Reviewed by: Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon by Alexander Stefaniak April L. Prince Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon. By Alexander Stefaniak. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. [xiii, 308 p. ISBN 9780253058294 (hard-cover), $75; ISBN 9780253058287 (paperback), $20; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Tables, music examples, endnotes, bibliography, index. Alexander Stefaniak opens his recent monograph with the always astonishing details of Clara Schumann’s musical life: over a thousand concerts performed across sixty years, international acclaim, collaborations with some of the most important musicians of her era, admiring critics, undeniable compositional prowess, and pedagogical acumen. By 1877, the fifty-eight-year-old was at the pinnacle of her career. That same year, the critic L. K. reflected on Schumann’s trajectory in an article for Leipzig’s Signale für die musikalische Welt. L. K. had first heard the performer in 1833. While her earlier performances relied on music that they considered “wild and chaotic,” Schumann’s concerts were now grounded in Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (p. 2). The critic celebrated these programmatic transformations: “The change between ‘Clara Wieck’ and ‘Clara Schumann’ signifies the marriage of the old virtuosity with the classical garb and Verseistigung [spiritualization] of the new” (p. 2). This “marriage” of sorts—between Clara Schumann and the Austro -German canon—guides Stefaniak over the course of his excellent new study. In the past several decades, Clara Schumann scholarship has evolved in exciting trajectories. Current studies show fresh, critical perspectives on all aspects of Schumann’s life. (See Joe Davies, “Introduction: Clara Schumann in the Musicological Imagination,” in Clara Schumann Studies, ed. Joe Davies [Cambridge: Cambridge University [End Page 233] Press, 2021], 1–12.) Stefaniak’s Becoming Clara Schumann situates itself firmly within this community. Engaging eloquently with wide-ranging scholarship, pluralistic primary source materials, concert touring strategies, and programming and compositional practices, Stefaniak offers a fascinating, holistic look into Clara Schumann’s canonical legacy. An important complement to his previous examination of Robert Schumann’s nineteenth-century virtuosities, this new monograph shifts to investigate how Clara Schumann similarly navigated the perils of empty virtuosity and authentic revelation by “inherently infus[ing] pianism with interiority” (p. 11). (See also Alexander Stefaniak, Schumann’s Virtuosity: Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016].) Positioning Schumann as both a pragmatic “strategist” and a musical “idealist,” Stefaniak asks us to recognize how performers—perhaps even more so than composers—profoundly shaped canonic ideologies. To be sure, “Schumann invites us to view the canonic tradition not only as a body of musical works but as a dynamic, evolving reality in the everyday professional lives of performers” (p. 281). Organized largely chronologically, each chapter examines a distinct issue related to aspects of Schumann’s career and canonic status. Traversing from her earliest concertizing to her time as a professor in Frankfurt at Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium, Stefaniak keeps several threads front and center: “canon formation, concepts of interiorit y, Schumann’s gendered public image, and the ways in which she and other performers exercised creative agency” (p. 15). In the first two chapters, Stefaniak examines Schumann’s early concert programming and her 1840s transformation into an authentic interpreter. While this period is sometimes positioned as antithetical to the development of the canonical ideal, Stefaniak guides the reader through compelling music analyses and argues that Weick’s showpieces by Frédéric Chopin, Adolf von Henselt, and Sigismond Thalberg shaped her approaches to resplendent virtuosity. Her strategies were undeniably successful, as relatively quickly “critics heard interiority in the very sound Clara Schumann produced at the piano, regardless of what repertoire she played” (p. 36). Greater attention to aesthetic debates grounds the second chapter, as Stefaniak focuses on the ways Schumann expanded and ratified this association to interiority. Undeniably, her marriage to Robert Schumann positioned her as a crucial part of a composer–interpreter partnership—a musical partnership that was quite calculated in its alignment with the practices of canonic formation. As Robert transformed his compositional approach to gain critical...

Spanish Thinking about Animals

This book gathers the work of 15 Spanish scholars working in the field of animal studies. It presents an interdisciplinary overview of humans’ abusive relationship with animals in Spanish art (in a chapter by Verónica Perales Blanco), literature (in chapters by Carmen Flys-Junquera, José Marchena Domínguez, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and Diana Villanueva-Romero), film (in a chapter by Claudia Alonso-Recarte and Ignacio Ramos-Gay), philosophy (in chapters by Lydia de Tienda, Jesús Mosterín, Alicia Puleo, and Marta Tafalla), and law (in a chapter by Nuria Menéndez de Llano). It also contains a chapter discussing the rise of the antispeciesist movement (by Estela Díaz and Oscar Horta) and an annotated bibliography on speciesism (by Daniel Dorado). The book aims to challenge human exceptionalism in Spain by examining ethical and aesthetic arguments, as well as cultural representations of animals (p. xxvii).A significant part of the book is devoted to bullfighting. This focus is justified: Spain as a whole has a bad reputation for animal cruelty because of this practice, even though only a small minority of Spaniards support bullfighting.1 Bullfighting is a national fiesta and seen as an important part of Spain's cultural heritage. It has, moreover, been promoted by iconic artists such as Federico García Lorca and Pablo Picasso (p. xxi), as well as celebrated contemporary authors like Mario Vargas Llosa and Fernando Savater (p. 130).2Around 60,000 animals are annually tortured in popular festivals in Spain. This includes not only bulls and cows, but also horses, geese, goats, lambs, and various other animals (p. xxi).3In her chapter “Animals as Ornaments: On the Aesthetic Instrumentalization of Animals,” Marta Tafalla argues that one form of animal exploitation is aesthetic instrumentalization, that is, using animals as ornamental objects to provide humans with aesthetic pleasure (p. 54). Bullfighting is a legally protected example of aesthetic instrumentalization, as the law treats this activity as a form of art (p. 55), comparable to flamenco. In fact, bullfighters go as far as declaring bullfighting “the art of arts” (ABC, 2017).Jesús Mosterín's chapter “Failed Arguments in Defense of Bullfighting” provides a concise list of counterarguments against common arguments in favor of bullfighting, useful for politicians, policymakers, and animal rights activists working on banning this activity. For example, Mosterín argues that there have been many cruel traditions that society has censured and abolished, such as burning heretics and the Chinese custom of binding women's feet. He accordingly argues that “culture is not static; it is a dynamic reality, constantly changing, subject to diverse influences, one of which is rational criticism” (p. 131).4The exact origin of the famous idiom “take the bull by the horns,” meaning to decisively deal with a difficult or dangerous situation, is unknown. Some ascribe this idiom to bullfighting, others to the American Old West, and yet others to farmers’ practice of controlling bulls by holding their horns. In any case, Spanish scholars and animal rights advocates are currently taking bullfighting “by the horns,” campaigning to ban this cruel practice in Spain. In fact, the Canary Islands banned bullfighting in 1991 and Catalonia followed suit in 2010 (p. xxii).5 Unfortunately, other cruel festivals involving animals, such as cockfighting and correbous, are still celebrated in those regions.6 In 2016, one of the cruelest festivals in Spain, the Toro de la Vega in Tordesillas (Valladolid), involving spearing a bull to death, was finally banned after relentless opposition from the animal rights movement (p. xxii).7Despite these important advances, bullfighting is still protected and promoted by Spanish law and financed by the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy Programme (Eurogroup for Animals, 2020). The special attention this volume gives to bullfighting is justified because understanding bullfighting is essential to understanding why animals do not receive greater legal protection in Spain. The law must be consistent with bullfighting. In bullfighting, a bull is painfully and repeatedly stabbed and finally killed with a sword, as the crowd applauds. A law that permits bullfighting is a law that permits animals to be tortured and killed. Thus, the existence of bullfighting is bad not only for bulls but for all animals, since other animals are left without adequate legal protection in order for bullfighting to continue.This and other interesting topics can be found in this wide-ranging and up-to-date collection. The volume will be of interest to anybody following the latest research in the field of animal studies in Spain as well as anyone interested in understanding and ending cruel uses of animals and cruel traditions involving animals.The author wishes to thank Paula Casal, Carlos Contreras, John Horden, and the editors of the Journal of Animal Ethics for their editorial support.

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn'sIbsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Worksand Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn's<i>Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works</i>and Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Aesthetic Criteria in Fundamental Physics—The Viewpoint of Plato

I discuss the role of beauty in physics. Physicists are sometimes described as platonists for their conviction that the fundamental laws are elegant and aesthetic arguments represent an important epistemic tool. After a review of the ideas of Plato and some of the leading figures of modern physics, which suggest that this is indeed the case, I present a list of current aesthetic criteria. I focus on symmetry and unity and demonstrate their increasing relevance in an array of experimentally verified theories. I also deal with an open issue of naturalness as the third criterion. The laws of nature appear increasingly beautiful as we uncover them, and it is important to see if the trend continues in the future.

Visual Ekphrasis and the Articulation of the Past

This essay focuses on examples of graphic representations of architecture as they appear in architectural treatises and published studies of particular buildings or sites. I argue that these images are a form of writing, as they have syntactical and linguistic qualities. In this way, images are a kind of visual ekphrasis of the architecture they describe. These visual ekphrases of architecture make the past a place that is distinct from that which text-based antiquarian studies articulate, opening up questions of how we perceive space and time and the ways in which they can be visually described. I concentrate on a moment in the mid-eighteenth century when the past also extended geographically, as travel in Greece became possible and revealed a new past with different scholarly legacies from the more familiar ancient Roman examples. The resulting Graeco-Roman controversy that dominated architectural discourse shows us how visual descriptions were used as evidence in different aesthetic debates and how they pulled architecture into the present, enabling it to be used part of architectural practice. My discussion focuses on two publications which both appeared in 1762: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens: Measured and Delineated, and Giambattista Piranesi’s Ichnographiam Campi Martii antiquae urbis (Ichnographia of the Campus Martius of the ancient city). This line of enquiry allows us new understandings of how images operated as an inspiration to architects’ imagination, and of the ways in which they influence how histories can be formulated.

Can dialectic materialism produce beauty? The “Great Aesthetic Debates” (1956–1962) in the People's Republic of China

AbstractThis article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

Transcribing Form: The Ekphrastic Image in Interwar British Art Journals

ABSTRACT Photographs of sculpture in interwar British art journals played a key role in the articulation and dissemination of abstract aesthetics. Through comparative analysis of the journals Axis (1935–1937) and Circle (1937), this article argues for the historiographical significance of such editorial presentations of sculpture, by demonstrating the central role these publications played in furthering interwar aesthetic debates. Axis and Circle were responsible for developing particular visual and verbal conventions for representing abstract art in print, influencing subsequent art-historical publications. This article traces the journals’ construction of these conventions and shows how an interplay between text and image foregrounded the aesthetic ideas they wished to convey. Image and text function ekphrastically in Axis and Circle, prompting an active form of reading that shows the reader not just what abstract art should look like, but what it should be like to encounter it. The significance of this is three-fold: first, it provides a precise chronology for the development of specific conventions for representing abstract sculpture in print. Second, it highlights the phenomenological potential of modernist art journals. Finally, it shows how the study of journals can further art-historical knowledge and understanding of the development and dissemination of abstract aesthetics.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Banknotes of the Irish Free State

This article considers the banknotes printed in the Irish Free State as discrete case studies in order to examine the aesthetic debates of the 1920s, between the rural and the urban; insularism and internationalism; between the decision to foster native artists or present an outward-looking nation by commissioning the most renowned artists outside of Ireland; between choosing the visual representation of partition or its symbolic erasure. The focus of the article is the first series of legal tender notes known as the ‘Lady Lavery Series’, issued from 10 September 1928, and the consolidated banknotes, referred to as the ‘Ploughman Series’, first issued between May and June 1929. The collaboration of artists, including John Lavery, Dermod O’Brien and E. L. Lawrenson, and government institutions, namely the Currency Commission and the Department of Finance, are considered, with specific attention to the design and reception of the two series of banknotes. The intermediary role of the banknotes advisory committee – consisting of art experts Thomas Bodkin, Dermod O’Brien and Lucius O’Callaghan – illuminate both the practical and aesthetic considerations weighed up by the artists and state institutions. The under-examined design processes behind the Free State banknotes are placed within the wider context of state-run commissions and competitions – coinage, postage stamps, official seals – that helped shape a distinctive visual identity for Ireland in the 1920s.

L’éditeur et le poète. Klaus Reichert se souvient

The translator and essayist Klaus Reichert is a scholar in English and American studies (especially a renowned expert on James Joyce), editor of Hans Carl Artmann&#8217;s poetical works, and former President of the Deutsche Akademie f&#252;r Sprache und Dichtung (2002-2011). From 1965 to 1969, he served as Paul Celan&#8217;s first reader at Suhrkamp. His book Paul Celan. Erinnerungen und Briefe (2020) is the testimony of the last contemporary who knew both the poet and the man. His many notes on personal matters and aesthetic debates testify to a close bond with the sensitive, often reserved, sometimes even irritable Celan. In response to his uncomprehending interlocutors, critics, and the literary establishment in general, Celan&#8217;s vehement clarifications shed new light on his conception of language, poetry and the poet in the face of &#8220;that which happened&#8221; (das Geschehene).

Response to “Jorge Luis Borges in Turkish: Magical Realism in a Politically-and-Poetically Motivated Literary Field” by Ceyda Elgül

Response to “Jorge Luis Borges in Turkish: Magical Realism in a Politically-and-Poetically Motivated Literary Field” by Ceyda Elgül Kurosh Amoui, Respondent This survey of Turkish translations of Borges is remarkable for two reasons, broadly speaking. First, it offers a window into the contemporary national literature of Turkey, and how the Turkish literary field (and the field of cultural production at large) must be contextualized within larger regional social and political frameworks. Second, it is part of the global reception of Borges, who certainly has become a canonical author of World Literature-travelling well beyond Argentina’s national borders. The overlapping of these two scopes has produced a comprehensive analysis that demonstrates how the reception of Borges in Turkey has been part of the globalization of “Latin American magical realism.” Borges’s own views on translation have been studied by Efraín Kristal and Sergio Waisman. I am quoting here at length the opening of Borges’s 1932 essay “Las versiones homéricas” (“The Homeric Versions”) that resonated with me when reading the closing of Elgül’s article: No problem is as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation. The forgetfulness induced by vanity, the fear of confessing mental processes that may be divined as dangerously commonplace, the endeavour to maintain, central and intact, an incalculable reserve of obscurity: all watch over the various forms of direct writing. Translation, in contrast, seems destined to illustrate aesthetic debate. The model to be imitated is a visible text, not an immeasurable labyrinth of former projects [End Page 223] or a submission to the momentary temptation of fluency. Bertrand Russell defines an external object as a circular system radiating possible impressions; the same may be said of a text, given the incalculable repercussions of words. Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers. Are not the many versions of the Iliad-from Chapman to Magnien-merely different perspectives on a mutable fact, a long experimental game of chance played with omissions and emphases? (There is no essential necessity to change languages; this intentional game of attention is possible within a single literature.) To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H-for there can only be drafts. The concept of the “definitive text” corresponds only to religion or exhaustion. The superstition about the inferiority of translations-coined by the well-known Italian adage-is the result of absentmindedness. There is no good text that does not seem invariable and definitive if we have turned to it a sufficient number of times. Works cited Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Homeric Versions.” Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 69–74. Google Scholar Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Vanderbilt UP, 2002. Google Scholar Waisman, Sergio. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Bucknell UP, 2005. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 Canadian Comparative Literature Association / Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée

M. E. Braddon’s Literary Apprenticeship: Heroism, Madness and Sensation in “Garibaldi” and Three Times Dead

ABSTRACT This article focuses on M. E. Braddon’s epic poem “Garibaldi” and her first published novel Three Times Dead. While they are different in topic and genre, they contain thematic and stylistic parallels that demonstrate Braddon’s literary experimentation at the onset of her publishing career in 1860. Both works reveal Braddon’s responses to contemporary issues, her literary tastes and her market-oriented attitude. This article first examines Braddon’s contribution to the “Garibaldimania” that gripped England in the 1860s, discussing how Braddon’s heroicization of Garibaldi bears evidence of a widespread tendency to use the Southern fighter as a trigger of self-criticism and as a valorous alternative to Victorian sceptic materialism. Attention is then paid to the unconventional villains featured in both texts, which represent deviance and power relations in ways that would go on to define sensation fiction as a genre. This article also scrutinizes the particular idea of madness around which the two works pivot. The links they establish between insanity and freedom anticipate late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories, such as those developed by Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault. On a metaliterary plane, finally, these 1860 works bear witness to Braddon’s contribution to the mid-Victorian aesthetic debate on what constituted proper literature.

Before | After: Thresholds Roundtable: The History and Legacy of Thresholds Journal

Before | After: Thresholds Roundtable: The History and Legacy of <i>Thresholds</i> Journal