The Case of “Jenny”

D ANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI and his artistic circle are emerging as privileged sites of modernist genesis. Studies by Jessica Feldman ( Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience ) and Allison Pease ( Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity ) include Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, respectively, in their reassessments of modernism. In a complementary move, Jerome McGann argues in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost that Rossetti's art anticipates Imagism (44) and is characterized by a “hyper-realism that anticipates certain Postmodern styles” (32). Such work implicitly questions, in Feldman's words, the narratives of “strife, loss, [and] rupture” (4) that have been told about modernism's relationship with its predecessors. By linking nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists in a historical trajectory of aesthetic change, as Pease does, or by effacing the historical through a “web” of Victorian modernism, as Feldman does, it becomes possible to see new relations among authors previously separated by critical practice. Rossetti and associates enjoy a new spotlight as they become modern through their aesthetic productions and domestic arrangements

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Classicism · Dialectic · Literature · Modernism (music · Narrative · Postmodernism · Realism · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

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