Author: Paola Spinozzi File Type: pdf It was in The Germ (1850), the first British magazine with an aesthetic manifesto, that the interart theories of the Pre-Raphaelites took shape. The thirteen young contributors advocated an ethical approach to art while at the same time acknowledging self-referentiality and meta-discoursivity. They defined the specificity of each mode of artistic expression while exploring the dynamic between word and image, moving from realism towards Symbolism and even anticipating Surrealism. The Aesthetes and Decadents were fascinated the Modernists felt challenged. Later in the twentieth century a succession of reappraisals transformed the Pre-Raphaelites into a well-marketed group of eccentrics, but neglected the complexity of their cross-cultural, verbalvisual art. This study aims to explain why claims about the autonomy and interrelatedness of the arts, expressed in the form of a provocative monthly journal, proved so influential as to be a source of inspiration for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book, The Savoy, and even for Modernist periodicals. Often regarded as a juvenile venture, The Germ was in fact a laboratory for expressive forms, themes, and ideas that had an enormous impact on the history of British culture. **Review In their fresh reassessment of The Germ, its ambitions, its paradoxes, and its self-reflexivity, the authors provide a useful literary and critical addition to the recent inclusion of Pre-Raphaelitism within the broader context of European Avant-gardes [...]. (Beatrice Laurent, Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens 79, 2014) About the Author Paola Spinozzi is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Ferrara. Her research includes an investigation of ekphrasis, illustration, and calligraphy in the work of William Morris, D. G. Rossetti, Walter Crane, and A. S. Byatt as well as a comparative study of scientific and creative writing. She is the author of Sopra il reale. Osmosi interartistiche nel Preraffaellitismo e nel Simbolismo inglese (2005) and the co-editor of Origins as a Paradigm in the Sciences and in the Humanities (2010) and Discourses and Narrations in the Biosciences (2011). Elisa Bizzotto is Lecturer in English Literature at IUAV University of Venice. Her main research focuses on Victorian and late Victorian literature and culture, and she has written extensively on Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and fin-de-siecle culture. She is the author of La mano e lanima. Il ritratto immaginario fin de siecle (2001) and co-edited, with Paola Spinozzi, the first Italian edition of The Germ (2008).

Author: Christopher Peterson File Type: pdf In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as beasts. Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.**