Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism (review)

There are many dimensions to this collection of essays. As promised by its title, this volume delivers a series of multinational perspectives on Pre-Raphaelitism and the movement's shaping influence on the cultures of the British colonies, continental Europe, and North America. Additionally, as Thomas J. Tobin notes in his introduction, the essays are "informed by feminism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, deconstruction, socialism, Orientalism, medieval textuality, and legal scholarship" (1). The resulting relationships are strikingly multidimensional; meaning is not only layered in these essays, but also emerges from a diverse array of intersecting horizontal and vertical perspectives.

Four of the essays deal with colonialism in its various manifestations: Francesca Altman writes about W. H. Hunt in Palestine, Margaret Stetz about the art critic Gertrude Hudson in India, Juliette Peers about Pre-Raphaelitism in colonial Australia, and David Latham about Pre-Raphaelitism in Canada. Taken together, these essays prove that the sun never did set on the British Empire. Continental Europe is represented by Tatjana Jukic's essay on Pre-Raphaelitism in Croatia, Éva Péteri's on Pre-Raphaelitism in Hungary, and Susan P. Casteras's on "Symbolist Debts to Pre-Raphaelitism" over a wide expanse of Continental Europe. Reversing direction, Beatrice Laurent writes of the formative influence of the medieval and early Renaissance European paintings that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood saw in 1849. The United States figures through Paul Hardwick's discussion of Morris, medievalism, and Christian Socialism in America, and through Sarah Wooton's tracing of Keats's poetry as a thread in both English and American Pre-Raphaelitism.

Among the accomplishments of Casteras's "Symbolist Debts to Pre-Raphaelitism: A Pan-European Phenomenon" is its convincing demonstration of the importance to the Symbolists of Edward Burne-Jones's and D. G. Rossetti's female figures, and of John Everett Millais's Eve of St. Agnes (1863) as well. Millais's painting was exhibited at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867, and subsequently acquired an "almost cult-like stature" (121); Rimbaud and Verlaine saw it in London in 1872 and 1873, and J. K. Huysmans cited it in A Rebours (1884). Thus "the literary appeal to the Symbolist poets was clearly established, along with the suggestive metaphors they created for the hypnotic beauty and power of women" (121). The wide embrace of Casteras's essay further establishes the presence of the Pre-Raphaelites (or their techniques and themes) in not only France and Belgium, but in the rest of Europe as well. This was less a cause-and-effect relationship than a combining: Casteras argues that "overall, it was the image of the fin-de-siècle female that united these diverse individuals and groups, all of whom recast their own visions of dreamy Burne- Jonesian and Rossettian feminine icons" (119).

The title of Florence Boos's "William Morris's Later Writings and the Socialist Modernism of Lewis Grassie Gibbon" refers to the pseudonym of the Scotsman James Leslie Mitchell, and Boos sees affinity between Morris's writing in the 1890s and Gibbon's 1930s trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932-35). She cites Gibbon's intellectual commitment to "diffusionism," which held "that humans had originally lived in free and genuinely egalitarian communal societies, a state of secular grace" (148). Morris shared this view. The late prose romances The House of the Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890), for example, depict Germanic tribes as exhibiting these qualities: we see them, strengthened by egalitarianism, fending off both Romans and barbarians. And by affiliating Morris's work in the 1890s with Gibbon's later novels, Boos validates her own incontestable assertion that recently there has been "a partial reassimilation of Victorian and early- twentieth-century writers" (145).

Stetz's "Pre-Raphaelitism's Farewell Tour: 'Israfel' [Gertrude Hudson] Goes to India" deftly intertwines women's emergence in the aesthetic movement with the unequivocal theme of British imperialism in India. As an art critic, Hudson was one of the women who, in words Stetz quotes from Talia...