18th and 19th Century British Literature and Performance

Session Coordinator: Susan Stiritz
Washington University

Hogarth's Bookishness: Narrative Art Performing as Visual Book in Eighteenth-Century England

In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), Hogarth proposes and justifies a self proclaimed “novel art.” This moment of Hogarthian wit can be taken seriously: as a child of Grub Street, a close friend of Henry Fielding, and a man deeply immersed in printing practices and textual culture, Hogarth had a clear investment in an innovative and literary art form. In addition to Hogarth’s well recognized integration of story and moral into his art works, I would like to propose that Hogarth’s “novel art” enacts ways of reading that complicate our traditional understanding of eighteenth-century novels. Thus, my project considers the ways in which Hogarth’s prints might have been “read” and asks how that process might reflect on the process of reading novels. The confusion that characterizes Hogarth’s Progresses (A Rake’s Progress, Industry and Idleness, and A Harlot’s Progress) would seem to thwart their narrative and temporal progression. Hogarth’s characteristic praise and use of “chase” – the movement of the eye from character to another, to the foreground, the background, and between individual plates, all while decoding symbols – is seemingly antithetical to the experience of reading a novel. But the material and visual quality of eighteenth-century novels such as Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and Tom Jones, suggest that the narrative structures of the eighteenth-century novel are more similar to Hogarth’s aesthetics than they initially appear. I propose that the variety and chaos that exist within Hogarth’s works are also peculiar qualities of eighteenth-century novels. Through their inclusion of epistles, typographic breaks, chapter divisions, self reflection, addresses to the reader, illustrations, and white space, eighteenth-century novels perform atemporal and alinear narratives that are materially and visually manifest for their readers.

Crystal B. Lake
University of Missouri-Columbia
cblvf2@mizzou.edu

John Keats and the Performance of Aesthetic Appreciation

While John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” offer his most famous statements on aesthetics and explore the relationship between the poet as observer and the work of art as observed object, in this paper, I focus on Keats’s earlier poems on aesthetic subjects, including “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” “This mortal body of a thousand days,” and “On a Leander Gem.” By grounding Keats’s performance of aesthetic response in contemporary theories of acting and theater criticism (including works by Diderot, Hazlitt, and others), I show that Keats modeled his depiction of the relationship between aesthetic object and poet on the relationship between actor and audience. These contemporary theories emphasize the tension between the actor’s emotional control and his expression of sensibility, a tension that is central both to the formal structure and the thematic content of these poems.

Theresa Adams
Westminster College

Buying Realism in East Lynne(s): Sensation Fiction and Victorian Spectatorship

Mrs. Henry Wood’s best-selling sensation novel East Lynne (1861) generated considerable critical debate over literary realism and morality. The novel generated considerable class anxiety; its wide readership threatened to make “the kitchen and the drawing-room kin,” in the words of one contemporary reviewer. Questions of realism and class are particularly relevant to the novel’s numerous adaptations. East Lynne was enormously popular as a melodrama, and it was parodied in a “Condensed Novel” and in numerous theatrical farces. In each adaptation, class is an important consideration in terms of audience and in the ways the different spin-offs depict class. Just as novel readership was expanding in the mid-century, so too were theatre audiences changing, as middle- and upper-class spectators began to return to the theatre they had previously considered disreputable.

This paper explores the links between class, realism, and spectatorship in adaptations of East Lynne. In “The Amusements of the People,” Dickens suggests that working-class spectators accept theatrical illusions of reality wholeheartedly, not recognizing that reality as constructed. Examining the ways in which East Lynne was dramatized and parodied suggests a much savvier response on the part of audiences, one that is aware of the illusions of melodramatic convention. As East Lynne became increasingly commodified, responses to it gained sophistication, often exhibiting the suspension of disbelief Marx associated with commodity fetishism. This keen awareness, and willful “forgetting,” of the illusions of the commodity was crucial to East Lynne’s parodists and satirists, whose success depended on audiences’ conscious negotiation of melodramatic convention.

Ann-Marie Dunbar
Indiana University, Bloomington
arlarson@indiana.edu