The Visual Worlds of Life Writing
Portraits and Biographical Practice in England, c. 1660s to 1750s
Seiten
2025
Liverpool University Press (Verlag)
978-1-80207-456-7 (ISBN)
Liverpool University Press (Verlag)
978-1-80207-456-7 (ISBN)
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An Open Access edition of this book will be made available on publication.
The Visual Worlds of Life Writing brings into conversation the two most popular genres in long-eighteenth-century England: portraits and biographies. As key instruments of social formation when Britain was “forging the nation” (Linda Colley), they were wielded alike by Whigs and Tories, the aristocracy and the commercial middle-classes, high-class artists and grub-street writers. They were most persuasive, however, when used jointly: portrait prints, ideally accompanied by ‘Brief Lives’, sold by the thousands. National histories were re-issued to include pictures. Portraitists were required to stage their sitters as though taken from real-life situations.
Embedded into such interplay between texts and images was an aesthetic claim: doing biography was a multimedia enterprise. Far from being just words on a page, eighteenth-century life writing came with frontispiece portraits, illustrations, or elaborate title pages. Biographers directed their readers to existing portraits of their subjects to enhance the reading experience. Portraits made of calligraphic writing blurred the boundaries between text and image.
As a thorough reassessment of visual culture’s role in producing biographies, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the rhetorics of portraiture and life writing, an historical account of their sister arts tradition, and an inquiry into the social function of profiling people.
The Visual Worlds of Life Writing brings into conversation the two most popular genres in long-eighteenth-century England: portraits and biographies. As key instruments of social formation when Britain was “forging the nation” (Linda Colley), they were wielded alike by Whigs and Tories, the aristocracy and the commercial middle-classes, high-class artists and grub-street writers. They were most persuasive, however, when used jointly: portrait prints, ideally accompanied by ‘Brief Lives’, sold by the thousands. National histories were re-issued to include pictures. Portraitists were required to stage their sitters as though taken from real-life situations.
Embedded into such interplay between texts and images was an aesthetic claim: doing biography was a multimedia enterprise. Far from being just words on a page, eighteenth-century life writing came with frontispiece portraits, illustrations, or elaborate title pages. Biographers directed their readers to existing portraits of their subjects to enhance the reading experience. Portraits made of calligraphic writing blurred the boundaries between text and image.
As a thorough reassessment of visual culture’s role in producing biographies, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the rhetorics of portraiture and life writing, an historical account of their sister arts tradition, and an inquiry into the social function of profiling people.
Kerstin Maria Pahl is Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Visiting Professor at Humboldt University Berlin.
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 28.2.2025 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Eighteenth Century Worlds ; 14 |
| Zusatzinfo | Illustrations, color; Illustrations, black and white |
| Verlagsort | Liverpool |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 156 x 234 mm |
| Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile |
| Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-80207-456-2 / 1802074562 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-80207-456-7 / 9781802074567 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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