… Institut for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur …, 2007
This essay partly gives a brief survey of the status of the Canzoniere in nineteenth-century Engl... more This essay partly gives a brief survey of the status of the Canzoniere in nineteenth-century England when the collection was finally translated in full into English, and partly traces the significance of Laura in English literature after eighteenth-century biographies had transformed her from a vague Platonic ideal into a real, existing woman. The essay therefore traces the complex interrelationship between biography, translation, fiction and poetry and the ongoing dialogue with Petrarch in such highly self-conscious writers as Byron, Foscolo, Collins and Christina Rossetti. For centuries Petrarch's note about Laura's death in his Virgil manuscript has been the object of much scholarly interest. The manuscript, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, would appear to have been very easily accessible in the nineteenth century when a young English visitor devoted her very special interest to it. 1 The visitor was none other than Mrs Anna Jameson (1794-1860) who by the mid nineteenth century had become one of the most popular female art critics in England. In a chapter on Petrarch and Laura in her book The Loves of the Poets of 1829, she describes her visit to the Ambrosiana: Gushing up like the waters of an intermittent fountain, there was a sudden flow of feeling and memory came over my heart:-I stood for some moments silently contemplating the name of LAURA, in the pale, half-effaced characters traced by the hand of her lover, that name with which his genius and his love have filled the earth. Confused thoughts of the mingling of vanity and glory,-of the 'poco polvere che nulla sente', and the immortality of deified beauty were crowded in my mind. When all were gone, I turned back, and gave the guide a 1 Petrarch's Virgil manuscript also came top of the list when, in 1863, the young poet A.C. Swinburne advised his sister Alice on what to see in Milan: "But at Milan you will have enough to do. 1st, the Ambrosian Library, where there is a Virgil illuminated or painted in small by Simone Menni (?) for Petrarca;"
The chapter explores Pater’s work with literary form and voice, demonstrating his ability to cons... more The chapter explores Pater’s work with literary form and voice, demonstrating his ability to construct narrative, drama, and fictitious personalities. It revolves around the diary format as a narrative device in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and ‘Sebastian van Storck’. With their French and Dutch settings, these two portraits explore Pater’s own European ancestry and employ paintings as plot devices, chronicling the rise of the modern self. Redefining the epistolary genre, Pater added layers of nineteenth-century interiority in a process of deformation which selected certain aspects of the diary novel, while suppressing others. As the chapter traces Pater’s version of the female complaint in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, it also discusses interiority as a feature of modernity and the act of writing as an addictive one, related to the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis. Pater was much inspired by Senancour’s novel Obermann and Amiel’s journal intime. His Sebastian constitutes a fictitio...
This chapter discusses Pater as a ‘maker of time’, forming, rather than finding the past. It plac... more This chapter discusses Pater as a ‘maker of time’, forming, rather than finding the past. It places the imaginary portraits in the contexts of the historical novel, of Pater’s dialogue with Jules Michelet, and the Bildungsroman, demonstrating the complexity of Pater’s argument with the past. The linearity of unbroken time is part of the romantic narrativization of history in a century when history became an academic discipline, when the emerging nation-states developed philosophies of history, when the historical novel came into its own and vied with the Bildungsroman about how to chronicle the life and development of the individual in relation to major historical events. Questioning such concepts as the truth and the factual by alluding to the historian’s ‘imaginative sense of fact’, Pater challenged fact-based positivism and claimed history as a literary art. Chapter 7 suggests Pater as the missing link between Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf in the construction of a collective me...
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Jun 3, 2019
, when Charles Eastlake had secured the purchase of Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor (c. 157... more , when Charles Eastlake had secured the purchase of Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor (c. 1570) for the National Gallery (Fig. 1), he noted with satisfaction: Portrait of a tailor in a white doublet with minute slashes-dark reddish nether dress-a leather belt [strap & buckle] round the end of the white dress. He stands before a table with scissors in his rt hand, & a piece of [black] cloth in the left.
… Institut for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur …, 2007
This essay partly gives a brief survey of the status of the Canzoniere in nineteenth-century Engl... more This essay partly gives a brief survey of the status of the Canzoniere in nineteenth-century England when the collection was finally translated in full into English, and partly traces the significance of Laura in English literature after eighteenth-century biographies had transformed her from a vague Platonic ideal into a real, existing woman. The essay therefore traces the complex interrelationship between biography, translation, fiction and poetry and the ongoing dialogue with Petrarch in such highly self-conscious writers as Byron, Foscolo, Collins and Christina Rossetti. For centuries Petrarch's note about Laura's death in his Virgil manuscript has been the object of much scholarly interest. The manuscript, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, would appear to have been very easily accessible in the nineteenth century when a young English visitor devoted her very special interest to it. 1 The visitor was none other than Mrs Anna Jameson (1794-1860) who by the mid nineteenth century had become one of the most popular female art critics in England. In a chapter on Petrarch and Laura in her book The Loves of the Poets of 1829, she describes her visit to the Ambrosiana: Gushing up like the waters of an intermittent fountain, there was a sudden flow of feeling and memory came over my heart:-I stood for some moments silently contemplating the name of LAURA, in the pale, half-effaced characters traced by the hand of her lover, that name with which his genius and his love have filled the earth. Confused thoughts of the mingling of vanity and glory,-of the 'poco polvere che nulla sente', and the immortality of deified beauty were crowded in my mind. When all were gone, I turned back, and gave the guide a 1 Petrarch's Virgil manuscript also came top of the list when, in 1863, the young poet A.C. Swinburne advised his sister Alice on what to see in Milan: "But at Milan you will have enough to do. 1st, the Ambrosian Library, where there is a Virgil illuminated or painted in small by Simone Menni (?) for Petrarca;"
The chapter explores Pater’s work with literary form and voice, demonstrating his ability to cons... more The chapter explores Pater’s work with literary form and voice, demonstrating his ability to construct narrative, drama, and fictitious personalities. It revolves around the diary format as a narrative device in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and ‘Sebastian van Storck’. With their French and Dutch settings, these two portraits explore Pater’s own European ancestry and employ paintings as plot devices, chronicling the rise of the modern self. Redefining the epistolary genre, Pater added layers of nineteenth-century interiority in a process of deformation which selected certain aspects of the diary novel, while suppressing others. As the chapter traces Pater’s version of the female complaint in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, it also discusses interiority as a feature of modernity and the act of writing as an addictive one, related to the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis. Pater was much inspired by Senancour’s novel Obermann and Amiel’s journal intime. His Sebastian constitutes a fictitio...
This chapter discusses Pater as a ‘maker of time’, forming, rather than finding the past. It plac... more This chapter discusses Pater as a ‘maker of time’, forming, rather than finding the past. It places the imaginary portraits in the contexts of the historical novel, of Pater’s dialogue with Jules Michelet, and the Bildungsroman, demonstrating the complexity of Pater’s argument with the past. The linearity of unbroken time is part of the romantic narrativization of history in a century when history became an academic discipline, when the emerging nation-states developed philosophies of history, when the historical novel came into its own and vied with the Bildungsroman about how to chronicle the life and development of the individual in relation to major historical events. Questioning such concepts as the truth and the factual by alluding to the historian’s ‘imaginative sense of fact’, Pater challenged fact-based positivism and claimed history as a literary art. Chapter 7 suggests Pater as the missing link between Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf in the construction of a collective me...
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Jun 3, 2019
, when Charles Eastlake had secured the purchase of Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor (c. 157... more , when Charles Eastlake had secured the purchase of Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor (c. 1570) for the National Gallery (Fig. 1), he noted with satisfaction: Portrait of a tailor in a white doublet with minute slashes-dark reddish nether dress-a leather belt [strap & buckle] round the end of the white dress. He stands before a table with scissors in his rt hand, & a piece of [black] cloth in the left.
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