NEW Online Resource: The Romantic Illustration Network Shakespeare Gallery

Posted on July 15, 2015 by marylshannon

Announcing: The Romantic Illustration Network Shakespeare Gallery

https://romanticillustrationnetwork.wordpress.com/shakespeare-gallery/

Ready for the 2016 anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the Romantic Illustration Network is delighted to announce its digitisation of prints from Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, courtesy of negatives provided by Professor Frederick Burwick (UCLA).

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was open to the public on London’s Pall Mall from 1789 to 1805. Featuring paintings of scenes from Shakespeare by major artists of the day, including Fuseli, Reynolds, and Kauffmann, the gallery was a popular if not a financial success.

Prints of the paintings were published in volumes (as well as in an illustrated edition of Shakespeare), and are now digitised here by the University of Roehampton for use under a Creative Commons license. Images are arranged alphabetically by play, and new plays will be added over the coming months, so do keep checking back on the site. We have also digitised the front matter from the volumes.

Click on the thumbnails to access larger versions of the images, and to view the full-sized image. Once you have clicked on a thumbnail there is space to add comments on each image, and we very much encourage you to do so.

If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions, please do let us know.

REGISTRATION OPEN: The Arts And Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Birkbeck, University of London, 16-18 July 2015

Posted on June 18, 2015 by marylshannon

The Arts And Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Birkbeck, University of London, 16-18 July 2015

Keynote Speakers: Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Meaghan Clarke, Kate Flint, Hilary Fraser, Michael Hatt, Lynda Nead, Jonah Siegel, Alison Smith

This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors and musicians imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. It aims to map the state of the field in this growing area of interest for nineteenth-century scholars by locating recent interdisciplinary work on sentimentality and art and writing and the senses within wider debates about the relationship between psychology and aesthetics in the long-nineteenth century.

Speakers will investigate the physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception and the mind/body interactions at play in the experience of a wide range of arts. Key questions include: How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?

Registration is now open for the main conference. To register, please visit: https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/artsandfeeling/

For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.artsandfeeling.com/

Event Report: ‘The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturised Gallery’, RIN 4, Saturday 6 June 2015

Posted on June 17, 2015 by marylshannon

The fourth Romantic Illustration Network symposium took place at the House of Illustration on Saturday the 6^th of June. Once again the event was well-attended with a friendly mix of regulars and new faces, local and international.

We had two inter-related themes for the symposium:

1.Miniaturization: Drawing on Peter Otto’s work on virtual culture in the Romantic period, is the illustration a form of virtual gallery? How does visual meaning change when an image is resized?
2.The Art of Quotation: How were literary quotations used to conceptualise visual images? How important are framing devices to the meaning of an image?

However, speakers were free to interpret the terms ‘quotation’ and ‘miniaturised gallery’ in any way they saw fit, and to raise any other questions they chose.

We kicked off with David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent) who presented us with his concept of ‘locations of curation’. After crediting William St Clair in RIN 3 for inspiring his quest for a new theory of illustration, Worrall explored what he described as two currently disconnected narratives – Romanticism and eighteenth-century theatre – to consider the changing moments when images interact with other objects, such as the people who view them. He used the example of theatrical portraits to demonstrate how images moved from stage, to page, to prints, to household objects.

Susan Matthews’s (Roehampton) paper interrogated questions of scale, domesticity, and artistic encounter, the idea of ‘meeting’ an artist though their illustrations. She pointed out that the name ‘House of Illustration’ (as opposed to ‘Gallery of Illustration’) is significant: we often seem to want to give illustration a ‘home’. She focused on Fuseli’s illustrations to an edition of Cowper’s popular poem The Task (1785), and revealed the awkward tensions between Fuseli’s depictions of domestic scenes and Cowper’s lines, whilst also showing that Fuseli could produce powerful images on a small scale when he really wanted to. Matthews drew parallels between Fuseli’s techniques and the recent exhibition of Paula Rego’s work at House of Illustration.

Plate 17, The Book of Urizen William Blake Archive

From here we zoomed in still further, with Peter Otto’s (Melbourne) paper on plate 17 of Blake’s The Book of Urizen (1794). Otto gave a detailed and original reading of the plate which encompassed The Terror and images of decapitation by guillotine, the story of Adam and Eve, Perseus and the Gorgon, and the Narcissus myth to show how the plate connects primal history with events unfolding in the present through an art of visual and textual quotation. He argued that the plate illustrated a turning point in society, represented as a decapitation, and that Blake was constructing an imagined reality through quotation which in turn tries to shape or frame what reality is.

From royal executions to royal collections, Kate Heard (Royal Collection) showed us how George III and George IV both engaged with the reproductive print market, albeit in very different ways, as prints enabled middle-class consumers to gain access to items in the Royal Collection. We saw how Royal Collection items circulated as prints, so much so that satirical caricaturists could imitate them, and she argued that the print market played a crucial role in the public sense of the King. We also saw what a fantastic resource the Collection is for scholars.

Taking us through to the Victorian period, Bethan Stevens (Sussex) spoke about her work on the albums of proofs put together by the dominant mid-century London wood-engraving firm, the Dalziel family. The firm of Dalziel produced the illustrations to a vast range of literary and non-literary texts, including such classics as the Alice books and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Stephens showed how, in the albums, the exclusion of words affects the status, form and narrative of illustration, and provokes a new attention to illustrations as images which enables all kinds of subversive and intriguing readings.

Three Bibliographical Society Studentships were awarded: Anne Musset (Warwick/Paris-Diderot), Tessa Kilgariff (National Portrait Gallery/Bristol), and Naomi Billingsley (Manchester). We ended the day, as usual, with a period of open discussion about the broader themes of the event and the future of the network (upcoming ventures include the panel at BARS 2015 in Cardiff and the digitised Shakespeare Gallery, currently under construction). After that we adjourned to the pub, to round off a successful and fun day with a friendly drink.

Details of the BARS panel will be appearing on the blog and website soon: we hope to see you there!

REMINDER: RIN 4: The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London

Posted on May 29, 2015 by marylshannon

The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery.
Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm
The House of Illustration, London
Peter Otto (Melbourne), David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent), Kate Heard (Royal Collection), Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Bethan Stevens (Sussex).
Supported by the University of Roehampton and the Bibliographical Society. Organised with the assistance of House of Illustration.

This session follows two themes:
1.Miniaturization: Drawing on Peter Otto’s work on virtual culture in the Romantic period, is the illustration a form of virtual gallery? How does visual meaning change when an image is resized?
2.The Art of Quotation: How were literary quotations used to conceptualise visual images? How important are framing devices to the meaning of an image?

…and other related questions.

Registration is free, and includes free entry to the main exhibition. You can download the full programme here.

To register, please email Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk, giving your name, job title, and institution (if applicable).

CFP: ‘The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’, Birkbeck College, University of London, 16-18 July 2015

Posted on May 12, 2015 by marylshannon

CFP: The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Birkbeck College, University of London, 16-18 July 2015

Keynote Speakers: Professor Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art, London); Professor Tim Barringer (Yale University); Meaghan Clarke (University of Sussex); Professor Kate Flint (University of Southern California); Professor Michael Hatt (University of Warwick); Professor Jonah Siegel (Rutgers); Alison Smith (Tate Britain)

“She saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman’s sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy…” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1860)

This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors, musicians and composers imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?

The conference will consider the historically specific ways in which feeling is discussed in aesthetic discourse. It will also, however, encourage reflection about the limits of an historicist approach for understanding the emotions at play in nineteenth-century aesthetic response and the possibility of alternative methodologies for understanding the relation between feeling and the arts.

Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to Dr. Vicky Mills at artsandfeeling@gmail.com by 9 January 2015. Please also attach a brief biographical note. Proposals for panels of three papers are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) panel justification.

Possible topics might include:

Languages of emotion (affect; feeling; sympathy; empathy; sentimentality)
Theories of feeling (psychologists; art critics; philosophers; authors)
The arousal of specific emotions (pain; joy; anger; grief; tenderness; anxiety; disgust) and the aestheticisation of the emotions
The physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception (Physiological aesthetics; empathy; the nervous system; head v. heart)
The arts and religious feeling (biblical painting; sacred music)
Artists, museum visitors and concert-goers in fiction
The gendering of aesthetic response
The codification of artistic expression
Museum Feelings (boredom; fatigue; the museum as a site of affect; the regulation of feeling)
Curating feeling
The ‘art of feeling’ (how to feel the right thing in response to music, art, sculpture)
Feeling and touch
The role of emotion in ekphrasis; translating feeling

The conference is organised by The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

CFP: ‘Illustrating History / Illustrer l’histoire’, Université de Valenciennes, 4 Dec. 2015

Posted on May 11, 2015 by marylshannon

‘Illustrating History / Illustrer l’histoire’

Université de Valenciennes

4 Dec, 2015 (Abstracts due 30 June, 2015)

The scholarly research group Illustr4tio, supported by CALHISTE (EA 4343), is pleased to announce a one-day symposium on “Illustrating history/ Illustrer l’histoire” and invites papers on the topic.

Following the first symposium on “The Birth of Images” (Dijon 2014) and the one on
“Literary Illustration Between Texts and Paintings” (Mulhouse/Strasbourg 2015), the event to be held at the university of Valenciennes on 4 December 2015 aims to explore the relationship between history, the visual arts and the act of illustrating. Central to this symposium will be exchanges about the status, form and function of such illustrations in a variety of media, whether early modern prints or contemporary graphic novels. Should we apprehend illustrations to Shakespeare’s history plays differently from engravings in Walter Scott’s or Charles Dickens’ novels?

Questions addressing « illustrating history » may cover the following areas, though not exclusively so :

• Illustrating history and series or cycles as opposed to single pieces (painting, furniture print)

• Illustrating history when one is experiencing the historic moment, for instance, war

diaries, illustrated correspondence

• History’s most frequently illustrated key moments : riots, revolutions, battles

• Historical figures illustrated in their biographies (form and function of such illustrations)

• How does illustrated history convey ideological and institutional discourses through

school textbooks, history books, dictionary entries, encyclopaedia ?

• Illustrations in critical literature on history

• Historians as artists and illustrators

• Illustrating history and illustrating fiction : contact or clash? Symbiosis and hybridation ?

• Material culture and the circulation of objects illustrating history

• How does history apprehend illustration ?

• History in graphic novels

• Illustrating historical fiction (Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Graves, etc)

• Illustrating history as a discourse on memory and contact or clash between several periodicities

We will be happy to listen to word-and-image scholars, historians, artists, and illustrators alike. There is no preferred methodology or theoretical approach but papers that are interdisciplinary and broach the topic from an intercultural angle will be most welcome. For the full CFP see our website Illustr4tio.

Deadline for abstracts (300-400 words): 30 June 2015

Abstracts (English or French) should simultaneously be sent to all members of Illustr4tio, with a short bio and bibliography :

Brigitte Friant Kessler, Brigitte.friant-kessler@univ-valenciennes.fr, and b.friant@free.fr,

Sophie Aymes Stokes, Sophie.Aymes@u-bourgogne.fr,

Nathalie Collé, nathalie.colle@univ-lorraine.fr

Maxime Leroy, maxime.leroy@uha.fr.

REGISTRATION OPEN: RIN 4: The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London

Posted on May 6, 2015 by marylshannon

The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London: Peter Otto (Melbourne), David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent), Kate Heard (Royal Collection), Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Bethan Stevens (Sussex). Supported by the University of Roehampton and the Bibliographical Society. Organised with the assistance of House of Illustration.

We are delighted to announce that registration for this free event is now OPEN.

You can download the full programme here.

To register, please email Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk, giving your name, job title, and institution (if applicable). Places will be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, and there will be a waiting list.

We are also accepting applications for 3 Bibliographical Society Studentships of £60 each, to assist postgraduate students with attendance. 3 spaces are reserved for the successful candidates.

To apply, please send your CV, and a statement explaining how your research fits with the work of the Network and/or the Bibliographical Society (200 words max), to Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk by Monday 25th May. Successful candidates will be notified by Wednesday 27th May.

New RIN member publication: Sandro Jung, ‘James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842’

Posted on May 1, 2015 by marylshannon

New RIN member publication: Special Promotion

Sandro Jung, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842 (Lehigh University Press, May 2015)

Get 20% off with this downloadable flyer.

“Sandro Jung’s study of The Seasons is a fresh and stimulating history of the publishing and marketing of one of the most popular texts of the eighteenth century. But it is also far more than that. This book radically extends our understanding of the cultural and economic value of Thomson’s poem by investigating its visual readings and its complex cultural afterlife within and far beyond Britain as the poem’s imagery morphed across an astonishing range of visual arts, including engravings in books, prints, cartoons, ceramics, furniture, and music. The result is a persuasive demonstration of the intersections between technology, aesthetics, commerce, market, and reception.”

— James Raven, University of Essex and Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

“Here is the writing of a fresh new chapter in the scholarship of The Seasons. Consideration of print, paratexts, pictures, price, and pocket diaries all make for the richest contextualisation yet of the production and consumption of James Thomson’s poetic masterpiece from its first appearance to the early decades of the nineteenth century.”

— Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem’s cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions’ publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

About the Author

Sandro Jung is research professor of early modern British literature and founding director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University.

The Visual and the Verbal’, a skills-based training event for postgraduate students using material held at the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University on Wednesday 20th May.

Posted on March 18, 2015 by marylshannon

The Visual and the Verbal’, a skills-based training event for postgraduate students using material held at the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University on Wednesday 20^th May.

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/english/events/visual-verbal.htm

The Ruskin Library holds the largest collection of material relating to the life and work of John Ruskin (1819-1900), one of the most important cultural figures of his era in the English-speaking world. Among the most important manuscripts in the collection are 29 diary notebooks, covering the period 1835 to 1888, and c. 4000 manuscript letters. Also in the Library are over 1000 drawings by Ruskin, with others by his associates and pupils, and 125 plates from his collection of daguerreotypes, one of the most important collections of early photographs in the world dating from 1845-1858. The strength of the archive lies in its breadth and depth, enabling research in a number of disciplines, and it will be used at our event to teach the research skills required for work with both manuscript and visual materials. Students working in English, History, Museum Studies, Visual Arts, Art History are welcome to apply for this event.

The event will feature a combination of teaching methods, including intensive, practical hands-on sessions with Ruskin’s manuscripts. The event is being supported by the North West Doctoral Training Consortium. There are limited spaces but the training is open to both AHRC and non-AHRC funded students in the North West. Those nearing the end of their PhDs will be given preference (see below for details on how to apply). The students participating will be asked to prepare a five-minute presentation on their work in advance and to do some advanced reading.

10-11am: introductory seminar discussing what it means to do interdisciplinary research.

11am-12.30pm: students will give their presentations focusing on the ways in which their work is interdisciplinary and on their use of manuscript and/or visual sources. The postgraduate presentations will be filmed and made available on our website.

12.30pm-lunch: students will walk round the current Ruskin Library exhibition (Returned Triumphant: Loans to the Ottawa and Edinburgh exhibition ‘John Ruskin: Artist and Observer’).

2-3.30pm: there will be a hands-on session, where students will work with the full range of archive holdings held in the Ruskin Library, including Ruskin’s manuscript diaries, letters and notes to drawings, watercolours, engravings and photographs. We will teach skills of manuscript handling, palaeography, cataloguing, and discuss issues of transcription and editing.

4-5pm: there will be a workshop on approaches to the visual and verbal; this will focus on the nineteenth-century ‘ut pictura poesis’ debate (‘as in painting so in poetry’) and consider how we can attempt to approach the relationship between meaning in visual and verbal forms by means of analogy; semiotics or the concept of the ‘imagetext’.

5-6pm: there will be a practical session on the use of the notebook and forms of notation as research tools in the museum and archive. The workshop will offer guidance and examples of good practice of how to purposefully apply visual scrutiny, and students will draw from material held in the Ruskin collection.

The teaching team, all from Lancaster University, will include: Professor Sally Bushell (English and Creative Writing), Dr Gerald Davies (Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Art), Dr Andrew Lacey (Senior Research Associate, Davy Letters Project), Professor Sharon Ruston (English and Creative Writing), Dr Andrew Tate (English and Creative Writing), Professor Stephen Wildman (Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre; also former Curator of Fine Art at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).

To apply: students need to submit a 500-word abstract of their current research, stating why this event will be of use to them. Please also submit an estimate of travel costs to Lancaster for this event with your application. Applications should be submitted by Friday 10^th April. Applications and enquiries should be addressed to Prof Sharon Ruston, s.ruston@lancaster.ac.uk

Birkbeck History and Theory of Photography Research Centre Events

Posted on March 5, 2015 by marylshannon

History and Theory of Photography Research Centre

Events are free and open to all, at 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.

Upcoming:
Tuesday 10 March, 6:00-8:00pm
Keynes Library (room 114)
Seminar:

Carol Jacobi (Tate Britain) and Hope Kingsley (Wilson Centre for Photography)

‘Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860’

Carol Jacobi and Hope Kingsley will be talking about the aesthetics and reception of salted paper prints in the nineteenth-century, and the experience of curating an exhibition of these rare early photographs in the twenty-first.

For other events see the website.