«Buon dì, messer cantore!»: Isaotta, la bellezza e i modelli europei

The essay proposes a suggestive reading of Isaotta Guttadauro (1886) by d’Annunzio from a new critical perspective. Evasion and fantasy are not a literary game for its own sake but they have a parodic and polemical intent towards a materialistic simplicity that had lost the aesthetic dimension of the experience. The main object is the attendance of Beauty and Literature to guarantee the evolution of the civilised man. It also explores the European models that had influenced d’Annunzio’s choice: Keats, Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that had a lot of followers in Rome during the Umbertine Period (1878-1900).

Pre-Raphaelite Poetry

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris in the early stages of their careers sought to turn modern poetry in new directions by reinterpreting both the body and the spirit of the arts practised in Europe and Britain before Raphael. Four things marked their encounter with the past. First, both went directly to primary sources. Second, they began by making their own translations, verbal or visual; the act of translating brought to consciousness the particularities of both past and present. Third, both moved from translation to pastiche and invention, finding new ways to use the past to create in the present the shock of the new. And finally, these activities were shared projects, fired by the exchange of work and ideas among a circle of family, friends, and fellow artists and poets.

The Pre-Raphaelites

Across media including painting, stained glass, architecture, photography, and furniture, the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle explored medievalism’s inheritances and produced new and radical responses to the Middle Ages in bold new visual culture within Britain and its empire. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur provided stimulating springboards for emerging ideas regarding the arts in relation to narrative, memory, religion, and romance. Tropes of love, heroism, and beauty were by turns subverted and lauded in diverse Pre-Raphaelite efforts to contend with the Middle Ages and to graft their own values within its spirit. Focusing on what made the Pre-Raphaelite vision innovative, and considering the differing registers of engagement with the Middle Ages through encounter with contemporary and medieval literature across the arts, this chapter considers the unique contribution of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and Edward Burne-Jones to the spirit of medievalism that gripped the modern Victorian imagination

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Little Green Book, and the Dispute with Death

The most commonly recited anecdote regarding Dante Gabriel Rossetti recalls the incident surrounding the burial of his bound manuscript of poetry in 1862 alongside his wife Elizabeth Siddal. Buried in an act of contrition encouraged by his brother, the manuscript was retrieved from the exhumed coffin at Rossetti's behest in 1869 by his friend Charles Augustus Howell and returned to the poet in a severe state of decay and smelling of disinfectant. Three of the poems recovered would famously form an integral part of the 1870 Poems. This essay situates Rossetti's action in undertaking the exhumation as a trope for the way his poetry consistently revisits and reconfigures conceptualisations of life and death, often with regards to physical and spiritual embodiment. Without seeking to offer ethical justification for Rossetti's actions in retrieving his poems, I will focus rather on the ways in which his poetic vision is dominated by the language of exile and return, of burial and retrieval, and how these twin concerns are manifest in the poems of the little green book. These three long poems, which it appears he was most eager to recover through the distasteful act, are identified collectively as ‘the exhumation poems’: ‘Dante at Verona’, ‘A Last Confession’, and ‘Jenny’.

Glasstexts: Seeing Through Rossetti's Material Word

Rossetti's relationship to the material has always received critical attention, most recently in the work of Matthew Polotsky and Brian Donnelly. Eric Fontana has investigated the speech acts in his poems, but no work has considered words themselves as material objects in Rossetti's poetry. Focusing exclusively on instances of glass inscription in Rossetti's poems, I show how the poet's material words recognise reading and writing as visual experiences we sometimes forget we are having. By analysing inscribed glass in three key Dante Gabriel Rossetti poems, ‘Words On The Window-Pane’, ‘Jenny’, and ‘Rose Mary’, I investigate the ways in which Rossetti's glasstexts assume the duality of the surfaces on which they appear, arguing that they draw our attention to words as both things and pictures of things. I suggest that scratched, scrawled and engraved words enhance the contradictions and complications inherent in glass, and intensify the complex interplay between transitivity and reflection that defines the experience of reading itself. I also argue that these glasstexts are of their historical moment because, as Isobel Armstrong has shown, they are preoccupied with surface markings that betray glass as visible mediation, revealing its dual function as medium and barrier.

The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine

This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks at two titles that have been suggested as the starting point for this genre: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal The Germ (1850—e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Holman Hunt), and the closely linked Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856—e.g. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) that anticipates the message of the Arts & Crafts Movement, in which several contributors would be involved. Finally, the early tendencies in these journals towards a conceptual integration of their contents and the formal / material aspects of the printed text is related to the mid- to late-Victorian ‘Revival of Fine Printing’, which is argued to develop alongside the little magazine genre.

Nash, Paul (1889–1946)

Paul Nash was an artist who responded both to a British tradition of landscape painting, specifically to the art of William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and J.M.W. Turner, and to new developments in European modernism. He worked across several media: painting in watercolor and oils, book illustrations, design, and photography. He was inspired by literature, including the poetry of W.B. Yeats, the prose of Sir Thomas Browne and artist-poets like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was himself a writer of essays, and of letters published posthumously. Born in London, he achieved early success in the London art world, contributing to the crisis of brilliance (Henry Tonks) that shaped modern art in Britain before the Great War. He served as an official war artist in both world wars, and painted some of the most famous images of conflict, including Wire (1918), The Menin Road (1919), Battle of Britain (1941) and Totes Meer (1940–1941). Between the wars, he became a leading figure in British modernism, co-founding Unit One in 1933 and exhibiting at the International Surrealist Exhibitions in London in 1936 (which he helped to organize) and in Paris in 1938.