University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Curating the object: Art collection and aesthetics in nineteenth-century Britain

Dickison, Carrie

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DICKISON-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/106409

Description

Title
Curating the object: Art collection and aesthetics in nineteenth-century Britain
Author(s)
Dickison, Carrie
Issue Date
2019-07-11
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Saville, Julia F.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Saville, Julia F.
Committee Member(s)
  • Goodlad, Lauren M.E.
  • Courtemanche, Eleanor
  • Nazar, Hina
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2020-03-02T22:28:39Z
Keyword(s)
aestheticism, nineteenth-century aesthetics, Victorian literature
Abstract
This dissertation explores influential art critics, poets and novelists who—contra Oscar Wilde’s famous claim that “all art is quite useless”—affirmed the “use” of art to human care and cultivation. By turning art and other artifacts into things to be acquired and arranged, mid-Victorian collectors transformed “Arts and Crafts” into a fashionable cult of the objet d’art. For instance, Charles Eastlake’s decorating manual, Hints on Household Taste (1868), beckoned readers to create the private museum as a self-contained “thing of beauty.” The writers I discuss rejected this fantasy of autonomous art and drew on John Ruskin’s legacy to develop a social understanding of the aesthetic object. By the nineteenth century, the meanings of the “curator” (a caretaker of things) and the “curate” (a healer of souls) had drifted far from their common Latin root, curare (to heal or to care). By contrast, Margaret Oliphant’s series novels, Robert Browning’s verse, Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction, and Wilde’s essays realigned these terms to suggest a model of curatorship which connected the care of beautiful objects to the care of others and the care of the self.
Graduation Semester
2019-12
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106409
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2019 Carrie Dickison

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Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
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