Browsing by Author "Costello, Leo"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemEmbargo
    American Art Histories: Framing Race in Exhibitions, 1842-1876
    (2018-04-06) Hooper, Rachel; Costello, Leo
    In the mid to late nineteenth century, exhibitions in the United States presented histories of art by laying out sequences of objects. Paintings, sculptures, and prints were aligned or juxtaposed with so-called artifacts and specimens as well as plaster casts of classical sculpture in order to convey a sense of progress or development across epochs and cultures. Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on a sculpture or painting on display in Washington, D.C., New York, Ann Arbor, New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia and outlines the terms by which the artwork was interpreted in situ. Drawing on installation photographs and previously unpublished lectures, this project reveals the formative role that ideas about race played in art exhibitions open to the public at the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, the Metropolitan Fair, academic art museums, and the 1876 Centennial Exposition during the political upheaval and radical social change surrounding slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Who should be a part of art history? How would their stories be told? i These questions were central to the organization of nineteenth-century art exhibitions and the answers formulated at that time have powerful ramifications even to this day. The notion that race could be defined by location, time, and physicality suggested that what was then known as the “fine arts” had something to contribute to a scientific study of race. Curators, artists, and scholars in the United States responded by arranging collections to make them speak to ideas of racial progress and categorization. Objects from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe were gathered as points of comparison for modern American art and culture in displays that resulted in a contested racial politics of objects. This dissertation is the first to acknowledge public exhibitions as constitutive of early art historical discourse in the United States and racial categorization as fundamental to the institutionalization of the discipline.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Perspectives on History and Heritage: J.M.W. Turner's Estate Views
    (2020-04-21) Celeste, Jane Evans; Costello, Leo
    From the moment the ground is broken and the cornerstone laid, a British country estate enters into a complex interrelation between past, present, and future. For generations, these stately dwellings provided a home for the traditional understanding of heritage: inheriting family property. Yet these houses also served as fundamental sites for advancing heritage on a larger scale: building and preserving a national history. Even today, the British country estate provides a throughline from the past, to the present, to the future. To better understand the complex processes by which heritage is created, preserved, and disseminated, this dissertation examines the estate views of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). By considering his paintings and sketches of British country homes, I draw out four perspectives, four different visual and cultural approaches to history and heritage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through this taxonomy, I not only reveal the pictorial negotiations taking place within Turner’s estate views, but I disentangle the various webs of influence affecting these perspectives on multiple levels: the personal, historical, and socio-political. Accordingly, I seek to reevaluate the relationship between our current methodologies for studying and conserving history and heritage and those of Turner’s era. My chosen primary materials—Turner’s views of Fonthill, Stourhead, Harewood, and Farnley—have not been considered as a discrete set of works, despite the fact that they established an important clientele for the entirety of Turner’s career. Commissions at each of these estates brought Turner into contact with aristocratic patrons with decided interest in history. Yet as Turner recorded his patrons’ perspectives, these views also became part of his own past, present, and future. As my project makes clear, Turner’s estate views came to influence his later work in powerful and unexpected ways. My methodology is at once historical, art historical, and literary. I deconstruct the country house commission in order to reconstruct a multistoried rendering of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century approaches to history and heritage. By examining the physical estates and primary source documents related to both the patron and artist—estate records, correspondence, and contemporary publications—in conjunction with Turner’s preparatory drawings and finished works, we gain a much clearer picture of the patrons, of their relationship with Turner, and of the results of these commissions in the short and long terms.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Silence, Sentimentalism, and the British Romantic Novel, 1789–1824
    (2015-04-24) Saikin, Anna Dodson; Regier, Alexander; Joseph, Betty; Costello, Leo
    My dissertation argues that silence provides a lens through which we can trace the development of the Romantic novel from the eighteenth century novel. In the eighteenth century, anxieties about female selfhood and identity become linked to proper modes of communication that reveal class and/or gender differences that could threaten the social order they were meant to uphold. If performed correctly, it was thought, expressions of sympathy would contribute to the development of sociability by establishing a prescriptive narrative to teach readers how to respond to suffering bodies. The sentimental novel silences female experience and rewrites it into a teleology that can be used for an observer’s emotional and moral advancement. I argue that Romantic novelists including Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen adapt situations and themes from the sentimental novel to reframe silence as an empowering form of expression that mitigates social and historical anxieties about female selfhood and individuality. As representative authors of the gothic, historical, and domestic novels, Radcliffe, Scott, Burney, and Austen rework silence into a positive exploration of the social implications of sympathy. My dissertation advances a theory of the novel’s development that addresses the conflict between appropriate means of communication and women’s disappearance from the publishing marketplace by reframing silence not as a symptom of female vulnerability but a communication strategy that emerged as a way to overcome repressive market forces. Following an introduction that situates the popularity of the sentimental novel between the moral ethos set by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and the critical uncertainty faced by women writers, my first chapter investigates settings in Radcliffe’s gothic novels where silence proliferates to show how her heroines overcome their inability to protest their suffering by escaping to sublime landscapes. My second chapter develops the gothic’s critique of sympathy as a social phenomenon through an investigation of visual scenes and moments of aphasia in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Building on Scott’s development of the historical novel, my third chapter examines the limitations of class-based sympathetic responses in Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer (1814), to show how the protagonist’s refusal to speak about her identity limits her mobility. My fourth chapter concludes my dissertation by examining the impact of Austen’s development of free indirect discourse on the novel’s ability to represent female interiority. Beginning with an investigation of conduct books that advocated reticence as the proper means for women to communicate, I argue that Austen’s development of free indirect discourse permits the reader to see through the artificiality of society’s mannerisms and conversation. When read as a group, these four novelists show the variety of means by which the Romantic novel recuperates silence as a positive form of female self-expression.