Research Catalog

Title

The myth of the Renaissance in nineteenth-century writing / J.B. Bullen.

Author

Bullen, J. B.

Publication

Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

336 p. : ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

Few people who use the word 'Renaissance' today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a 'myth' or story constructed by writers to explain the past. In this innovative and wide-ranging study, J.B. Bullen traces the genesis of that myth back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seeds of the idea are to be found in Voltaire, but Dr Bullen shows how it was taken up by French art historians and Gothic revivalists as an important element in the acrimonious political and religious debates within French historiography. The book's main focus, however, is on English intellectual life and the ways in which writers like Pugin, Ruskin, Browning, and George Eliot took up the terms established by Hugo, Rio, and Michelet in France and adapted a reading of fifteenth-century Italy to suit the special conditions of Victorian England. Ultimately, in the work of Swinburne, Arnold, Pater, and Symonds the Renaissance became a key factor in relating ethics and, in its aesthetics and late nineteenth-century phase, the myth figures prominently in an important discussion about the relationship between power, authority, and individualism. The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing is a major contribution to the analysis of a neglected aspect of Victorian intellectual life and will be essential reading for all scholars and students of the nineteenth century.

Subject

• English literature > 19th century > History and criticism
• French literature > 19th century > History and criticism
• Myth in literature
• Renaissance > Historiography
• Renaissance in literature
• Romanticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [308]-322) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

1. The Foundations of Renaissance Historiography in the Eighteenth Century: Voltaire and Gibbon -- 2. The Genesis of the Renaissance: Seroux d'Agincourt -- 3. The Renaissance among the Historians: Roscoe and Sismondi -- 4. The Renaissance among the French Romantics -- 5. The Renaissance as Revived Paganism: A. W. Pugin -- 6. The Renaissance and Protestant Confusion: England in the 1840s -- 7. The Renaissance as Fall from Grace: John Ruskin -- 8. The Renaissance as Rediscovery: Michelet and Quinet -- 9. Renaissance Men and Women: Browning -- 10. The Renaissance and Regeneration: George Eliot -- 11. The Renaissance Revised: England in the 1860s -- 12. The Renaissance as Enactment: Walter Pater.

ISBN

0198128886 (alk. paper) :

LCCN

^^^93005373^

OCLC

28419804

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library