Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity by Wendy Graham (review)

In Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity, Wendy Graham seeks to put the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) at the center of two histories: the history of the avantgarde and the history of modern celebrity.

In making the case for the PRB's claims to avant-garde status, Graham focuses less on their aesthetic allegiances than on their cultural politics. Chief among the movement's "affronts to the regimes of taste and official canons of propriety," Graham argues, were the challenges to bourgeois heterosexual masculinity posed by figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who exhibited a hedonism and emotionality that countered Victorian demands for masculine self-restraint (xiii).

It will not come as a surprise to anyone that the PRB did not present itself as staid and respectable. In making the case for the PRB as a sexually avant-garde movement, Graham focuses on two relatively under-studied phenomena: the homoerotic energy circulating among the PRB's male members, and the movement's connections to the painter Simeon Solomon, who achieved some success with paintings of beautiful young men until his arrest in 1873 for attempted sodomy, after which the PRB abandoned him. Graham squares the PRB's homoerotic bonds with one another and their harsh rejection of an actual gay man by drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's argument in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) that male homosociality is itself a form of misogynist homophobia.

In making the case for the PRB's centrality to the history of celebrity, Graham focuses on the contradictions of a movement that ostentatiously claimed to reject middle-class values even as its members sought mainstream commercial success. Graham defines Rossetti as a particular kind of celebrity: the reticent, reclusive celebrity who pursues publicity by claiming to renounce it. Such figures require others to do their puffing for them, and the book is at its best when documenting how the PRB used print culture to promote their coterie to a larger public. The book is especially useful for identifying those who influenced the PRB (Lord Byron, the Nazarenes, Thomas Carlyle), those affiliated with the PRB in its day (John Ruskin, Henry James, Oscar Wilde), and those who championed the movement at a later historical date (T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Ezra Pound).

Graham excels at tracing how the PRB used anonymous reviewing to advance its brand without appearing to do so. The book offers a nuanced analysis of how the PRB managed the 1860s shift from unsigned to signed periodical essays, and provides a helpfully detailed account of the PRB's most vicious critic, poet Robert Buchanan, whose denunciation of "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871) only stoked the public's interest in it. Graham places Buchanan in the poetic ecosystem of his day, charts his many misfires with anonymous reviewing, and draws attention to his embrace of Walt Whitman's carnality despite his rejection of the PRB's fleshliness.

In terms of primary sources, Graham draws extensively on the correspondence among members of the PRB and on the essays and books that set the terms of the PRB's reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book has some curious lacunae when it comes to engaging with contemporary scholarship. P. David Marshall's Celebrity and Power: Fame and Contemporary Culture (1997), a foundational text in celebrity studies, goes uncited. The book's second chapter uses the example of Byron to show how scandal and negative publicity created celebrity before the PRB, but makes no reference to relevant work by Clara Tuite, Tom Mole, and Ghislaine McDayter. Finally, one of the most influential discussions of Rossetti's "Jenny" (1870), by Amanda Anderson, receives no mention.

Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity works best as a case study in the history of print culture's transition from anonymous to signed periodical publications, and as an account of how Rossetti, an individual countercultural celebrity, became canonical over time, especially...