Portraiture and British gothic fiction : the rise of picture identification, 1764-1835
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Portraiture and British gothic fiction : the rise of picture identification, 1764-1835
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012
- : hdbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [303]-325) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Traditionally, kings and rulers were featured on stamps and money; the titled and affluent commissioned busts and portraits; and criminals and missing persons appeared on wanted posters. British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, reworked ideas about portraiture to promote the value and agendas of the ordinary middle classes. According to Kamilla Elliott, our current practices of "picture identification" (driver's licenses, passports, and so on) are rooted in these late eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century debates. "Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction" examines ways writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and C. R. Maturin as well as artists, historians, politicians, and periodical authors dealt with changes in how social identities were understood and valued in British culture - specifically, who was represented by portraits and how they were represented as they vied for social power. Elliott investigates multiple aspects of picture identification: its politics, epistemologies, semiotics, and aesthetics, and the desires and phobias that it produces.
Her extensive research not only covers Gothic literature's best-known and most studied texts but also engages with more than 100 Gothic works in total, expanding knowledge of first-wave Gothic fiction as well as opening new windows into familiar work.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader
Introduction
1. Theory and/of Picture Identification
2. The Politics of Picture Identification
3. "The Age of Portraiture" and the Portraiture of Politics
4. Matriarchal versus Patriarchal Picture Identification
5. Portraits, Progeny, Iconolatry, and Iconoclasm
6. Identifying Pictures
7. Pictures Identifying
8. Iconism and the Aesthetics of Gothic Fiction
9. Desiring Picture Identification
10. Fearing Picture Identification
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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