Chapters and Articles by Emma Merkling
The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form, 2024
Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of ... more Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of the Victorian idyll, establishing its nature, lineaments, and significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British culture across media and genre.
Chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century’s close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories—subject, ecology, and form—this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods.
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 2024
This essay explores how English Aestheticist art of the 1870s drew inspiration from Charles Darwi... more This essay explores how English Aestheticist art of the 1870s drew inspiration from Charles Darwin to generate early visualisations of queer ecologies. Julia Margaret Cameron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones were attuned to Darwin’s queer undercurrents—including a generative unsettling of straight teleologies and imperatives to reproductive futurity—which they set to work in photographs, paintings, and drawings of plant-human entanglements. Their art mobilised ideas about the transformative power of unbounded desire, exploring how human and other-than-human forms were enmeshed by it. The aesthetic becomes a way to grasp—to luxuriate—in the unruly queerness of life itself.
The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form, 2024
This chapter looks at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph 'Maud' (c. 1874) from her photobook ill... more This chapter looks at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph 'Maud' (c. 1874) from her photobook illustrating Alfred Tennyson’s 'Idylls of the King' and other poems. Through close reading of its source text (Tennyson’s 1855 poem 'Maud'), sustained analysis of Cameron’s aestheticist photograph, and careful attention to the contemporaneous botanical writings of Charles Darwin, this chapter draws out the idyllism of Cameron’s 'Maud'. Its central focus is the ambiguities at the heart of Cameron’s photographic idyll, in which human and plant are entangled in an eroticized embrace. Clingy tendrils bind unstable subjects together, enabling potentially pleasurable yet certainly unsettling loopings and reversals of desire, agency, and will. Subjectivity is dispersed across the vegetal agents of the garden, ‘nature’ speaking multiply in feminine voices (lily, rose) to express desire, queerly, for Maud. Moving between analyses of photographic process, poetic voice, and scientific findings, this chapter hones in on the dispersals and confusions of the idyllic mode. In identifying how Cameron’s photographic idyll enables the interpenetration and even confusion of categories such as pain and pleasure, death and life, real and ideal, this chapter recovers the horror at the heart of the aestheticist idyll.
Art History, 2023
This essay examines spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan's representation of the self in several ... more This essay examines spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan's representation of the self in several paintings c. 1900, including never before discussed portraits. Starting with the portraits' unusual treatment of the face as deflecting psychological legibility, it argues that the ‘self’ that they figure aligns with that described in contemporary scientific writings, notably by experimental psychologist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers and physicist Oliver Lodge. Writing from perspectives sympathetic to spiritualism, Myers and Lodge described the self as immortal, composite and mutable, invisible yet physical, exceeding the confines of the material body, and related somehow to ether. This essay draws on the entangled fin-de-siècle histories of science and spiritualism (and activates some of Gilles Deleuze's later theories) to argue that De Morgan summoned this self into a form at least contingently visible by exploiting the representational potential of the mutable, imponderable ether and its widely assumed properties: energic, (hyper-)spatial, temporal, and spiritual.
immediations, 2018
This article argues that paintings of Aesthetic Movement artist Albert Moore (1841-1893) from the... more This article argues that paintings of Aesthetic Movement artist Albert Moore (1841-1893) from the mid-1870s onwards are works about consciousness and sensate experience, as defined by Victorian physiological psychologists. First, Moore’s depiction of female figures in these works is considered alongside Luce Irigaray’s theories about sensuous experience. The experiences Moore paints are holistic, private, and self-constituting: in them, self-touch is a mediation between inside and outside, self and world. Sensuous experience is envisioned as multiplicitous, involving the whole body. Next, the logic of Moore’s aesthetic system is compared to that of the nineteenth-century ‘graphic method’, whereby instruments tracked and transcribed inner physiological phenomena (such as the circulation of blood). Moore’s paintings are shown to register rhythms analogous to those of the viscera, unfolding in time. Finally, George Henry Lewes’ (1817-1878) theories of physiological psychology are considered alongside Moore’s use of pattern. Lewes’ holistic and corporeal model of psychological experience is similar to that represented by Moore. Both explore (i) the idea of sensation and sentience as experienced and organised by the whole body, and (ii) differing levels of consciousness. Moore’s forms and working method are multi-layered; his paintings are like corporeal weaves, analogues to the sensate body.
Evelyn & William De Morgan: A Marriage of Arts & Crafts, 2022
This essay looks at Evelyn De Morgan’s strange, highly allegorical paintings c. 1890 and identifi... more This essay looks at Evelyn De Morgan’s strange, highly allegorical paintings c. 1890 and identifies their symbolic mode as invested in that of algebraic, mathematical, or symbolic logic. It identifies new intellectual networks and resources of De Morgan’s, including William Stanley Jevons’s writings from the 1870s, and makes the case for taking the strangeness of her visual mode seriously.
Reviews by Emma Merkling
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 2023
Emma Merkling reviews 'Modern Spiritualism and Scottish Art: Scots, Spirits and Séances, 1860-194... more Emma Merkling reviews 'Modern Spiritualism and Scottish Art: Scots, Spirits and Séances, 1860-1940', by Michelle Foot (2023).
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 84(4), pp. 244–248, and is reproduced here with permission.
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
the world never saw before.' 1 The picture bears all the marks of her mature signature style: a l... more the world never saw before.' 1 The picture bears all the marks of her mature signature style: a loose and suggestive handling of paint, bold application of colour, and confident modelling of form. In places, paint is built up so thickly that it is raised above the surface of the canvas, lending a sculptural, tactile quality to the bodies and their surroundings. The work also displays her sensitive, intuitive, and (for her time) unorthodox portrayal of the body-especially the female body-as vital, lived-in. Though Cupid and Psyche depicts both male and female forms, it is Psyche whose body is literally foregrounded. She is portrayed as curious, outstretched arms actively searching for knowledge of her mysterious lover and for the truth of her situation. Both figures are imbued with the virility and awkwardness of youth, engaged in a clumsy dance of desire and reluctant restraint. Cupid, ears protruding from a boyish face, angles his body and lips towards Psyche at the same time as he jerks his left arm and leg away from her. Their flushed, ruddy cheeks and the blueish tint to their skin suggestive of the veins beneath reveal the life force pulsing within them, an effect redoubled by the layered, dimensional paint and rapid brushstrokes. It is this effect, this vital realism applied to the nude form, that took critics like Stephens aback. Psyche's features, he grumbled, were 'coarse and "blubbered"'; her face was 'vulgar' and her flesh 'without the sweetness, evenness, or purity of youth' that the Victorian public expected from high art renderings of the female nude (p. 610). M. H. Spielmann, writing in the Magazine of Art, branded Swynnerton 'a realist, not an idealist', and the Art Journal critic Claude Phillips made a similar point: 'the artist, in love with the unidealised truth, has not departed far from her vigorous and over-British young models.' 2 But the latter reviewers also found great value in her particular mode of realism, identifying in her art a quality that remains palpable today: Swynnerton's work moved beyond mere imitation to capture the real and vibratory rhythms of life itself. 'Her flesh-painting', observed Phillips, 'has a certain quivering reality not to be found in many renderings of the nude by contemporary English artists' (June 1891, p. 189). Spielmann concurred: Cupid and Psyche 'actually quivers with the pulsations of life' (p. 261). Swynnerton was used to ruffling feathers. Ambitious and independent, by 1890 the Manchester-born painter (1844-1933) had long been forging her own path in the British art scene. '
caa reviews, 2019
Emma Merkling reviews Elizabeth Prettejohn’s ‘Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation ... more Emma Merkling reviews Elizabeth Prettejohn’s ‘Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War’ (2017)
Books by Emma Merkling
The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form, 2024
This book establishes the nature, lineaments, and significance of the Victorian idyll as a formal... more This book establishes the nature, lineaments, and significance of the Victorian idyll as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British art and literature. It is the first to delineate the shared characteristics of this mode across a range of media and genres, identifying its earliest emergence in the 1830s, its widespread flourishing across multiple realms of Victorian culture in the 1860s, and its evolution in the following decades as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Essays in this volume pioneer the theorization of the Victorian idyll, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures in the mid-to-late Victorian cultural milieu. Chapters in this book work across three intersecting categories in approaching the Victorian idyll: subject, ecology, and form. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find contestations that can be characterized as versions of Victorian ecology, and that provide provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today.
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Chapters and Articles by Emma Merkling
Chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century’s close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories—subject, ecology, and form—this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods.
Reviews by Emma Merkling
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 84(4), pp. 244–248, and is reproduced here with permission.
Books by Emma Merkling
Chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century’s close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories—subject, ecology, and form—this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods.
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 84(4), pp. 244–248, and is reproduced here with permission.