The Pre-Raphaelites

• Published in: Victorian poetry 2020-09, Vol.58 (3), p.361-376
• Main Author: Boos, Florence
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; Aesthetics; Artists; British & Irish literature; Empathy; English literature; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Gardens & gardening; Interiority; Literary canon; Literary criticism; Literary translation; Metaphor; Morris, William (1834-1896); Poetry; Pre-Raphaelitism; Realism; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882); Sexuality; Sonnets; Subjectivity; Translation methods and strategies; Turn of the century; Woodcuts; Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
• ISSN: 0042-5206; 1530-7190; 1530-7190
• DOI: 10.1353/vp.2020.0023

In what follows I will discuss several articles on literary PreRaphaelitism and Rossetti's poetry, then consider articles and books that interpret Morris's poetry, translations, and utopian romance News Pre-Raphaelitism Critical approaches to artistic and literary Pre-Raphaelitism have long emphasized its attention to precise visual detail, but in "'Art of the Future': Julia Margaret Cameron's Poetry, Photography and Pre-Raphaelism" (Victorian Studies 61, no. 2 [Winter 2019]: 204-215), Heather Bozant Witcher suggests an alternate approach. Here the walled garden is a site of unconventional sexuality and rhetorical experimentation, as the queen objectifies herself "in order to suggest her own subjectivity," a risky strategy which is also "a plea for empathy, the ultimate act of imagination that would allow her jury to 'see' not only through the body whose destruction they are contemplating but also through her eyes, to perceive things the way she does" (p. 146). [...]in his "Essay on Comedy," Meredith argues that an unfiltered realism is insufficient to the aims of comedy and of literature in general, a view which links him both to the Pre-Raphaelites and later fin de siecle artists. Noting that the sentiment in sonnet 53 of "The House of Life," "What of her glass without her?" typifies the way in which Victorian "feminine tity could be lost in a hermeneutic hall of mirrors," she scrutinizes the many metaphorical mirrors throughout Rossetti's poetry, noting that in such poems as "A Portrait," the image found behind or in the mirror is not that of a beloved but of the artist himself.