The Sister Arts:
Poetry and Painting in Victorian Britain
Course Description
Among the many different kinds of poetry created in Britain during the Victorian age, there is one which transcends the medium of language to enter into a discourse with painting. The group of artists concerned are known as the Pre-Raphaelites. They rejected the artistic conventions and standards associated with the school of the Italian painter Raphael, standards which were propagated by the British Academy. Their quest for the beautiful for its own sake closely associates them with aestheticism, a contemporary movement in European art. Working in the mid-nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites give expression to the contradictions that existed in Victorian Britain between a process of continuing industrialization and technological advances on the one hand and the need for spiritual orientation in an increasingly materialized world on the other. It is characteristic of these artists that they often do not restrict themselves to one artistic discipline but work as writers and painters at the same time. This holds true of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in particular, who wrote poems as companion pieces to his paintings. In this course, we will study the verbal and visual work of this and other poets from the group (Charles Algernon Swinburne, William Morris) and familiarize ourselves with their intricate symbolism and the ways in which they juxtapose the spiritual and the mundane.
Required Reading: Christoph Bode (2001). Einführung in die Lyrikanalyse. Trier: WVT (ISBN 3-88476-478-0).
Prerequisites: Einführungskurs "Introduction to the Study of Literature"
Requirements for Credit: regular attendance, oral presentation, and term paper
Registration: To register, please send an e-mail to Dr. Egbert.
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The Sister Arts
