ENGLISH

Quaint, exquisite: Victorian aesthetics and the idea of Japan

By Lavery , Grace E

Book information

Publisher
Princeton University Press
Year
2020
ISBN
9780691183626, 9780691189963, 069118996X
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
19 MB (19749119 bytes)
Series
Princeton scholarship online
Pages
illustrations (black and white)\240
Time added
2020-07-26 19:24:52
ArtsBritish -- 19th centuryBritish -- Japanese influences;ArtsBritish--19th century;ArtsBritish--Japanese influences;ArtsBritish;Arts

Description

From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. This text explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. The work provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. It argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the 'subjective universal' condition of aesthetic judgment.

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