{"product_id":"cultivating-victorians-liberal-culture-and-the-aesthetic-9780812237542","title":"Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this provocative and historically detailed reading of the relations between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism, David Wayne Thomas challenges current critical assumptions concerning modern liberal agency and aesthetic experience more generally. Through meticulous examinations of literature, visual arts, popular culture, and politics, \u003ci\u003eCultivating Victorians\u003c\/i\u003e shows how a mid-Victorian liberal discourse of individual many-sidedness--understood as a cultivated disposition toward self-criticism and open-mindedness--was taken up by artists and writers as they claimed for art a self-reflecting agency at the core of the liberal ideal. Thomas makes plain, as well, the ongoing but often repressed stake of latter-day critics in the aesthetics of many-sidedness. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAs Thomas shows, an increasingly dominant mid-Victorian liberal culture employed its rhetoric of cultivation in projects as varied as aesthetic appreciation, self-improvement, and social amelioration. By looking to topics across both elite and popular culture, Thomas demonstrates how this liberal culture had to take shape in competition with other dimensions of Victorian public life. Thus several uncommon but illuminating contexts come under inspection here: the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant, a low-born imposter claiming a noble inheritance; the reportage on life-scale historical city replicas fashioned for temporary public exhibitions in the 1880s; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of producing and reproducing his artwork for a newly constituted consumer market. Thomas also reads extensively in notable Victorian intellectuals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTheoretically inventive, engagingly written, and vividly illustrated, \u003ci\u003eCultivating Victorians\u003c\/i\u003e is a timely invitation to rethink liberal values--like autonomy and reflective judgment--that have been routinely condemned as atomistic individualism and false universalism in recent decades.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e David Wayne Thomas\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Pennsylvania Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 01\/21\/2004\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 248\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.60lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.30h x 6.30w x 0.70d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780812237542\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 07\/01\/2004 pg. 2047\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDavid Wayne Thomas teaches English at the University of Michigan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Pennsylvania Press","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":40163148398707,"sku":"9.78E+12","price":60.95,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/9255\/0515\/products\/img_2ab5bdc4-20fb-4233-95f6-806ce7cfd832.jpg?v=1655043166","url":"https:\/\/bookstorenmore.com\/en-de\/products\/cultivating-victorians-liberal-culture-and-the-aesthetic-9780812237542","provider":"Bookstore N More","version":"1.0","type":"link"}