BA Art History and Chinese

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This unit explores the body in British art from the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848) to the death of Queen Victoria (1901). Structured both chronologically and thematically, it offers an in-depth look at how the body and its experiences were conceived, generated, and represented in British painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, prints, and the decorative arts by a range of makers, from the Pre-Raphaelites and Aestheticists to the Decadents and beyond.

Through close looking, historical analysis, and in-depth readings of primary and secondary sources, we will explore the body as cultural category to ask how Victorian artists understood, manipulated, and (de)constructed the body and embodied experience in their rapidly modernising world. Relevant contexts include gender and sexuality; labour and class; racialisation and othering; the legacies of empire; questions of power and beauty; the gendering of making; the limits of the ‘human’; and the role of science in upholding and deconstructing normative understandings of the body. 

1. introduce students to key artists active in Britain in the mid to late nineteenth century
2. provide a nuanced and advanced understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which Victorian artworks were made
3. provide an advanced understanding of the construction and significance of the body in Victorian art within relevant socio-political contexts and forces  
4. facilitate students’ development of nuanced and historically sensitive critical-thinking skills for approaching topics such as gender, race, and class
5. equip students with essential analytical tools and frameworks for approaching and crafting analyses of historical art, including the ability to appropriately engage primary and secondary sources 

On successful completion of this course unit, students will be able to demonstrate skills such as:

• Critical analysis of historical and contemporary sources
• Visual analysis
• Critical thinking
• Presentation of ideas
• Discussion and conversation
• Effective communication
• Independent time management
• Independent research
• Writing about art and the body 

Face-to-face seminars are designed to encourage student participation, discussion, and mutual exchange, notably through directed readings, groupwork, and in-class exercises and presentations designed to generate respectful dialogue. 

Teaching and set readings — essential for student participation and in-class contributions — will provide students with essential knowledge on major movements and shifts in Victorian art, as well as key relevant socio-political and cultural contexts. This knowledge will facilitate students’ own research, critical thinking, and analytical skills. In-situ teaching in gallery settings (tbc) will further encourage visual-analytical skills and provide key contextualisation of the Victorian city and its art-spaces with a particular focus on Manchester collections.

Formative and summative written assignments, oral presentations, directed reading, and independent research activities are all designed to attain the unit’s key outcomes. 

• have knowledge of the art produced by a wide range of artists in Britain c. 1848–1901, including key movements from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Decadents
• recognise and discuss the centrality of the body to Victorian art across media, and have an understanding of the body as a cultural category
• have a critical and historically nuanced understanding of sociopolitical and cultural contexts underlying constructions of the body in Victorian art, from gender and sexuality to race and class  

• be able to analyse and interpret artworks in a variety of media and with reference to the body and its construction in the second half of the nineteenth century  
• critically assess and deploy primary and secondary sources related to art-making and broader relevant socio-political contexts
• develop and construct original written arguments about artworks based in visual analysis and independent research into a range of primary and secondary sources  

• effectively communicate interpretations of artworks and relevant contexts to an audience
• critically analyse historical and contemporary texts from a variety of sources
• present complex ideas clearly, both in written and oral form. 
   

• work towards deadlines and effectively manage tasks;
• present and communicate complex ideas verbally
• construct and deliver a cohesive and coherent written argument

• Carol Armstrong, ‘Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography’, October 76 (1996): 115–141
• Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
• Tim Barringer, Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement (New York: American Federation of Arts and Del Monico Books/Prestel: Munich, 2018)
• Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, ‘The Texture of Capitalism: Industrial Oil Colours and the Politics of Paint in the Work of G.F. Watts’, British Art Studies 14 (2019): DOI: 
• Michael Hatt, ‘Physical Culture: The Male Nude and Sculpture in Late Victorian Britain’ in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. by Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)
• Thomas Hughes, ‘Wondrous Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata’, in The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form, ed. by Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling (New York, 2024), 167–83
• Dominic Janes, ‘Seeing and Tasting the Divine: Simeon Solomon’s Homoerotic Sacrament’ in Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, ed. by Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010)
• Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)
• Charmaine Nelson, ‘Venus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness’ in Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900, ed. Jan Marsh (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005), 46–56
• Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London, 2007)
• Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017)
• Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography (New Haven and London, 2024)
• Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990