{"product_id":"9780814253564","title":"Fact Into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood","description":"Contemporary criticism has tended to regard the Pre-Raphaelites merely as failed modernists. By placing the Brotherhood securely within its Victorian setting, however, Professor Sussman discovers it working within a distinctly nineteenth-century mode of typology or figuralism practiced by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, who in the 1840s articulated an aesthetic that, by fusing the tradition of typological Bible-reading with the new modes of experimental science and scientific history, found in the detailed, accurate representation of natural and historical fact the means to translate fact into figure, into the very embodiment of transcendental, divine meaning.\u003cbr\u003e When examined in light of this connection and coherence, the Brotherhood emerges as a band of serious artists who engaged the crucial artistic and cultural questions of their age. Dr. Sussman sees them as occupying a point of transition between the sacramental and the secular artists, and as perhaps among the last artists in the Western tradition who, through living in a secular age, sought to imbue the facts of history and contemporary life with sacred meaning through creation, in the modernist fashion, of a new iconography to replace a shared but exhausted cultural tradition.\u003cbr\u003e By rejecting the biographical approach that has characterized previous studies of the Brotherhood in order to treat as a unified whole the art and poetry it produced, Dr. Sussman is able to demonstrate conclusively that the work of Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, during the brief period of the group's existence, possesses a self-conscious coherence that draws upon this Victorian figuralism.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHerbert L. Sussman\u003c\/b\u003e is associate professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and the author of \u003ci\u003eVictorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology\u003c\/i\u003e (Harvard University Press, 1968).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ohio State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47031095853296,"sku":"9780814253564","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780814253564_p0.jpg?v=1763747124","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780814253564","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}