Total Artifice: Neo-Gothic Literary and Visual Art in Britain 1750-1789
type: CreativeWork
description: Art is sometimes compared to language. In this dissertation I argue that we have lost the syntax of neo-Gothic art. The internal movement, direction, and coherence of eighteenth-century Gothic art is no longer visible; its aesthetic force is drained, deadened by the weight of nineteenth-century invented traditions which we have failed either to shed, or reinvent. My work salvages what it can from this zone of aesthetic experience. This is not just a matter of personal taste. I argue that the aesthetics of the early Gothic Revival were political, or ‘metapolitical’, in the sense developed by the Marxist philosopher of art Jacques Rancière. Both in the discourse surrounding neo-Gothic art, and in the art itself, attempts were made to reconfigure the world into zones of privacy and public display; sacred and profane spaces were created, a whole series of integuments whose boundaries were drawn and redrawn to exclude different kinds of person, based on their political, confessional, and classed identities. These attempts to reconfigure the world into discrete spheres of experience were not separate from politics more narrowly conceived. When artists mobilised Gothic motifs I demonstrate they often did so with a view to participate in the organized struggle to dominate the church and state as well as the other organs of civic-representative power. It is one task of this thesis to reveal how materially consequential such strategies could be. Yet this layer of factional politics was not identical to the metapolitical level. To grasp the full significance of the early Gothic Revival we therefore need to keep on bringing these two layers into view, without collapsing them into one another, or treating them as if they were only abstractly related. Total Artifice is my attempt to think beyond this rigid alternative. In my first chapter I argue that Horace Walpole’s neo-Gothic style was not, as many scholars have suggested, informed by Burke’s concept of the sublime. Rather, I …
abstract: Art is sometimes compared to language. In this dissertation I argue that we have lost the syntax of neo-Gothic art. The internal movement, direction, and coherence of eighteenth-century Gothic art is no longer visible; its aesthetic force is drained, deadened by the weight of nineteenth-century invented traditions which we have failed either to shed, or reinvent. My work salvages what it can from this zone of aesthetic experience. This is not just a matter of personal taste. I argue that the aesthetics of the early Gothic Revival were political, or ‘metapolitical’, in the sense developed by the Marxist philosopher of art Jacques Rancière. Both in the discourse surrounding neo-Gothic art, and in the art itself, attempts were made to reconfigure the world into zones of privacy and public display; sacred and profane spaces were created, a whole series of integuments whose boundaries were drawn and redrawn to exclude different kinds of person, based on their political, confessional, and classed identities. These attempts to reconfigure the world into discrete spheres of experience were not separate from politics more narrowly conceived. When artists mobilised Gothic motifs I demonstrate they often did so with a view to participate in the organized struggle to dominate the church and state as well as the other organs of civic-representative power. It is one task of this thesis to reveal how materially consequential such strategies could be. Yet this layer of factional politics was not identical to the metapolitical level. To grasp the full significance of the early Gothic Revival we therefore need to keep on bringing these two layers into view, without collapsing them into one another, or treating them as if they were only abstractly related. Total Artifice is my attempt to think beyond this rigid alternative. In my first chapter I argue that Horace Walpole’s neo-Gothic style was not, as many scholars have suggested, informed by Burke’s concept of the sublime. Rather, I …
author: Carver, Dylan
language: eng
keywords: Gothic, Aesthetics, History Painting, Gothic architecture, Horace Walpole, Robert Adam, Benjamin West
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/47d699a4-3c6b-465e-8639-15fd1188bdf0/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-10-24
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:10Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.58369