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The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
In his classic study of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark describes the transformation of the Gothic from its eighteenth-century associations with the non-rational, the non-civilized, and the mysterious into the sacramental Gothic created in large measure by Pugin and Ruskin. This transformation of medievalism continued through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, sacramental Gothic had been subverted, changed into what Walter Pater calls in his essay “Aesthetic Poetry” a “profounder medievalism,” a medievalism that is closer in sensibility and artistic form to the contemporaneous Decadent movement on the Continent, to the work of Baudelaire and of Poe. This transformation can be illustrated in the sharp changes in the use of one of the most important signs of Victorian medievalism, the monastic or cloistered life, from the early Victorian writings of Thomas Carlyle, to the work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors of the late 1850s and William Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume of 1858, the original subject of Pater's essay.
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References
NOTES
1. The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Constable, 1950).Google Scholar
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