Hierarchy Of Genres Research Articles

The painted word: British history painting: 1750-1830

In the latter half of the 18th century, history painting ranked at the top of the hierarchy of genres which governed the theory of art in England. Hence portrait painters like Reynolds would base their portraits on the great models of antiquity, and landscape painters such as Wilson and Turner embellished their views with classical or historical subjects. This marked admiration for the Italian grand manner, fostered by the grand tour, gave way to the development of new, British, subjects, as a result of increasing prosperity coupled with military and naval victories around the world. London became the international centre of printmaking and print-selling (a position maintained until the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars); Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and Macklin's English History Gallery were established; and large numbers of history paintings were commissioned from figurative painters such as Reynolds, West, Northcote, Fuseli and Romney - serving as models for prints which became better known than the originals. This catalogue, based on an exhibition at the Helm Gallery, illustrates the interdependence of paintings, drawings and prints of the period, and in so doing seeks to make a contribution to a better understanding of a relatively neglected area of British art.

Subversion du sujet et querelle du trictrac : le Théâtre de Diderot et sa réception

J.C. Hayes : Subverting the Subject and the Backgammon Dispute. Diderot's Theatre and its Reception. An analysis of Diderot's theatre, and especially Le Fils naturel, which attempts to bring out its revolutionary nature, generally much less obvious today than it was in his own time. It can be clearly seen in contemporary criticisms, studied here. His theatre shocked critics as it was based not on character, which is hardly developed, but on situations. Part of this displacing of the interest towards a situation and away from the subject lies in the importance of gesture and decor. A particularly revealing example is the criticism directed against the detailed description of the setting for Le Fils naturel, which includes a backgammon set lying on a table. The scorn poured on this detail is symptomatic of critics' objections to the fact that Diderot upset the traditional hierarchy and distinction of genres.

L'Italie d'Antoine Watteau, ou le rêve de l'artiste

Watteau, a painter in the Northern tradition who never made the pilgrimage to Italy, was apparently fascinated by this latin civilisation. There was in Flemish painting a tradition of mixing conversations with subjects inspired by the commedia dell'arte and Arcadian myths ; but in Watteau's painting, the depiction of flirtation is almost always separate from evocations of Italian theatre. The characters of the commedia dell'arte constitute a modern mythology and explain that for him the fête galante appears, in the hierarchy of genres, as a substitute for historical painting. Pierrot replaces Apollo for new art lovers who look for a certain decorum but are blind to the meaning of the great genre.

Autopsie de la Bastille : peindre l'événement en 1789

This article studies the problem created by the urgent need to paint the storming of the Bastille, symbol of the beginning of the Revolution. This difficulty is particularly in evidence in the few paintings of the 1789 Salon devoted to the important events of that historic summer. It can be especially seen in a perhaps momentary, but nevertheless significant, blurring of the hierarchy of pictural genres. Painters like Vestier, Hubert Robert, Moreau le Jeune, Demachy or Houel, whose status was unclear (were they genre, architecture or landscape painters ?), painted the demolition rather than the storming of the Bastille ; this example leads us to reflect on why, in the space of a year, there was an unexpected alliance of history and landscape.

Axelson Revisited: the Selection of Vocabulary in Latin Poetry

Although it is now fifteen years since G. Williams' thorough-going criticism of B. Axelson'sUnpoetische Wörter, his discussion has failed to elicit the adverse response which might have been expected in view of the widespread influence exerted by the earlier work.The reason for this may be that Axelson's theory is so widely accepted that any refutation thereof may be disregarded. Yet surely Williams was right to point to the dangers of total reliance on statistics and to the necessity of considering the contexts in which words occur in Latin poetry. In this respect, he was not so much rejecting Axelson's work as pointing to its inadequacies: whereas Axelson would be content to label a word that occurs only rarely in poetry as ‘unpoetisch’, it is necessary, as Williams demonstrates, to take the further step of determining the effect that such a word has in a given context. This approach will be particularly helpful, for example, in the case ofparvulusat Virg.Aen.4.328, where the heightened pathos achieved by Virgil's use of a diminutive is better appreciated by the reader who is aware of the scarcity of diminutive adjectives in poetry and in epic above all. To recogniseparvulusas an ‘unpoetic word’, with Axelson, is the essential first step, but we should proceed a stage further to inquire what effect was intended by the employment of a form not normally found in elevated poetry.Of greater importance is Williams' rejection of the ‘hierarchy of genres’ theory, taken for granted by Axelson, that is, that Latin poetry may be divided into a number of higher- or lower-ranking genres and that the more elevated a genre the less unpoetic vocabulary it is liable to employ.

The Hibernian Experience: John Brougham's Irish-American Plays

John Brougham (1810-1880), America's most prolific dramatist, left over 160 identifiable scripts. He was also leading nineteenth-century actor in England, Ireland, and the United States; intermittently theatrical manager in Boston and New York; an embattled comic journalist; and author of numerous chauvinistic stories and poems about Ireland. Yet just over century since his death, he remains virtually unknown to the present generation of playgoers, readers, and even scholars. Arthur Hobson Quinn's mandarin History of the Drama (1923) cites Brougham as one who simply followed a British stage tradition and did not respond instinctively to themes.1 Quinn's pervasive nativist, elitist bias and post-Victorian predilection for stage-realism conditioned him to deprecate the Irish-American author, misunderstand his practiced comedic artifice, and even ignore his patriotic Revolutionary melodramas. Brougham lived and worked, wrote and published, in the United States fully thirty-three years over half his adult life but that wasn't enough for Quinn. The single major factor contributing to the scholarly neglect of Brougham's topical burlesques and multi-ethnic urban comedies probably has been Quinn's pioneering, subjective, influential chapter, American Comedy Types, 1825-1860, whose fabricated gallery of native characters and inclusive genre hierarchy have since hardened into unassailable critical mythology. It is noteworthy that, whereas Quinn's idiosyncratic essay includes no Irish immigrant characters, Brougham's 1850s social comedies contain no stage Yankees. Both Quinn and Constance Rourke, the author of Humor (1931), were Irish-surname Americans; but in their amalgamationist writings, Irish-American authors and IrishAmerican literary types have been undervalued or simply left out as is the case in regard to the work of John Brougham. His solid contributions to Irish-American immigrant literature, in particular, deserve to be better known.

The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel

At some point during eighteenth century, cultural climate in England was right for novel to begin its rise to a prominent position in hierarchy of genres. The same conditions also made it possible for women's lore, taste, judgement, feeling and words to become, for first time in history, fit matter for literature. Despite scholarly attention that has been devoted to each of these groundbreaking events, there remains obvious question of what one literary phenomenon had to do with other, or how together they participated in a larger cultural change. It is Ian Watt's well-known contention that popularity of such writers as Defoe and Richardson-and subsequent rise of noveldepended on economic individualism and Puritan ethic they shared with a substantial portion of new reading public. But as his study of eighteenthcentury novel comes to a close, Watt seems to realize that a notion of literary production based on shared social values and inside knowledge of commercial life fails to explain the majority of eighteenth-century novels, namely, those written by women.1 To account for conspicuous appearance of a woman writer on literary scene, he falls back on a nineteenth-century commonplace and, speaking of Jane Austen, claims, the feminine sensibility was in some ways better equipped to reveal intricacies of personal relationships and was therefore at a real advantage in realm of novel. 2 Surely this will not do as explanation for why women gained authority to write literature and have it received as both female and literary, nor does it indicate why female literary authority coincided with emergence of novel as a literary form. Lest we dismiss Watt's theory too quickly, we should note that feminist critics also have difficulty in correlating social and literary changes that occurred during late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Watt's theory of text as a reflection of socio-economic interests on part of new middle classes derives from his study of readership and conditions for literary reception. In contrast, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's definitive study of nineteenth-century women novelists concentrates on authors and conditions in which their works were produced. On this basis, they argue that author's sex is far more important than class affiliation, nationality, or matters of personality.3 Since so many novelists were women by fact of nature, and since