Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images -- characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images. J. B. Bullen explores this fascinating link between the image and the idea in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, and demonstrates how Hardy approached his work from a particular "point of view" which not only...

Few people who use the word "Renaissance" today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a myth or story constructed by writers to explain the past. In this innovative and wide-ranging study, J.B. Bullen traces the genesis of that myth back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seeds of the idea are to be found in Voltaire, but Bullen shows how it was taken up by French art historians and Gothic revivalists as an important element in the acrimonious political and religious debates with French historiography. He then focuses on English...

Continental Crosscurrents is a series of case studies reflecting British attitudes to continental art during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It stresses the way in which the British went to the continent in their search for origins or their pursuit of sources of purity and originality. This cult of the primitive took many forms; it involved a reassessment of medieval German and Italian art and offered new ways of interpreting Venetian painting; it opened up new readings of architectural history and the "discovery" of the Romanesque; it generated a debate about the value of...

Addressing the concept of writing, this volume seeks to re-examine a range of issues and themes arising out of the Victorian period.