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Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext, edited by Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer; pp. xi + 262. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, £55.00, $99.95.
In this intelligently edited collection, the quality of individual essays is high, and the editors have a clearly articulated agenda. Noting that art history, as an academic discipline, has been slow to take account of the rhetorical structures, local arguments, and ideological motivations that shape textual accounts of Pre-Raphaelitism, Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer have invited the essayists to participate in a project of critical historiography. Hence their title: the object of study is the long history of the "writing" of Pre-Raphaelitism not only by contemporaries and participants but by scholars, critics, and biographers.
Opening essays by Deborah Cherry and Julie Codell suggest the volume's principal historiographic narrative. Codell documents a late-nineteenth-century effort among British critics to refashion the once rebellious Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood into exemplary figures of British artistic modernity. Though contested and incomplete, the undertaking was nonetheless effective: not only William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais but Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones were recuperated as national artists, exemplars of heroic masculinity and hence fit, morally and physically, to represent Britain as a European cultural force and an imperial power. The grounds of their modernity were, however, debatable: for some it was their realism and engagement with modern, urban, industrial life; for others (including most Europeans), it was their early contribution to late-century modern art of the irrational and strange, of dream and symbol. Not only reviews but the studio visit, the memoir, the life-and-letters biography, the posthumous exhibition, and the single-artist monograph contributed to what Codell characterizes as the nationalization, sanitization, and domestication of Pre-Raphaelitism.
For Cherry this first moment of "writing the Pre-Raphaelites" shaped the iconic moment of their late-twentieth-century return to popular and scholarly attention, the 1984 Tate Gallery exhibition. In a lively and pointed reading of that exhibition's installation, its catalog essays, and the affiliations of the authorizing Committee of Honour, Cherry notes their conservative return to...