Victorian
Romanticism
and the
Visual
Imagination:
From the Picturesque to the Sublime to the Decadent
A seminar
Script:
• The Eighteenth-Century “Grand Tour”: Roman ruins and
the British sensibility.
• The English garden: From Versailles to the Picturesque to Burke
and the Sublime.
• Rousseau and Blake.
• Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
• Horace Walpole and the gothic and the pagan.
• Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, 1800.
John Keats
• Paintings of Joshua Reynolds, John Constable and William Girtin.
• The 1840s: the emergence of photography, especially in the work
of Henry Fox Talbert.
• Ruskin’s Modern Painters.
• Paintings of J. M. W. Turner
• Dickens' Pickwick Papers.
• The Pre-Raphaelites—in poetry and art—with an emphasis
on D. G. Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Algernon
Swinburne, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and J. W. Waterhouse.
• The journey to inner nature, the landscape of the mind: The “aesthetic”
end of the century: Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley: decadent
and perverse? Does Freud belong here?
Using the resources of the Web and the technology of WebCt and PowerPoint,
we’ll explore, first, the creation of the Eighteenth-century platform
from which the British romantics launched their verbal and visual pyrotechnics,
and then explore the Victorian reaction in image and word to the romanticism
of Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats and their views of the natural world.
Students will learn technical skills useful in their academic futures
by preparing a PowerPoint presentation that will be published—along with a traditional academic
essay—on my web site.
AUDIO FILES
STUDENT AUDIO RESPONSES