8:174 Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes

Millais "Blind Girl"
J.E. Millais "The Blind Girl"

In this course we will study the art and literature of the mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelites and their successors in the Aesthetic movement at the end of the century. We will begin with antecedents and contemporary influences in the poetry and prose of John Keats and John Ruskin, and then examine the Pre-Raphaelite movement's artistic ideals and innovations in the light of wider politial and cultural events of the period.

We will devote the main part of the course to the poetry and prose of Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Toward the end of the course we will also consider a number of poems by late-century and early modernist writers such as Rosamund Marriott Watson and William Butler Yeats, noting the influence of Pre-Raphaelite ideals and motifs on later generations.