Abstract
This chapter explores the technique of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in bricolaging history out of fragments, in order to reuse and repurpose them. They reconstructed British literary and artistic cultural canon through embracing the virtues of disintegration, ambiguity, and transition, expanding their understanding through the interrogation of new historical periods and geographical spaces. These artists exposed the subjectivities and politics of canons, and the inventedness of historical origins and unity. They thus intervened in the processes of cultural formation to point to the new authority of the artist as the embodiment of cultural meanings and as pathfinders for others. Artists exposed a meeting between history and fiction in which an imagined moment in the life of a real historical individual presented an intertextual opportunity. The present was thus interjected into the past, destabilizing it, in order to allow artists to inscribe new meanings and relevance into history.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century |
Subtitle of host publication | Historicism, Postmodernism, and Internationalism |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis |
Pages | 145-163 |
Number of pages | 19 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781351004176 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2021 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences