The eye and the I: the essay and images
The eye and the I: the essay and images
This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.
587-600
Cambridge University Press
Brazil, Kevin
36fb33dd-0bba-43b7-a885-775ed8acfcda
Brazil, Kevin
36fb33dd-0bba-43b7-a885-775ed8acfcda
Brazil, Kevin
(2024)
The eye and the I: the essay and images.
In,
Gigante, Denise and Childs, Jason
(eds.)
The Cambridge History of the British Essay.
Cambridge University Press, .
(doi:10.1017/9781009030373.045).
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Abstract
This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 31 October 2024
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Local EPrints ID: 509406
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/509406
PURE UUID: a34bed79-b7c5-4311-84a0-ab8c060fa5de
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Date deposited: 20 Feb 2026 17:44
Last modified: 20 Feb 2026 17:44
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Editor:
Denise Gigante
Editor:
Jason Childs
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