On her book Fashioning Faces:The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism
Cover Interview of September 12, 2010
In a nutshell
Fashioning Faces, a cross-disciplinary study, looks at how literary and visual portraiture in the British Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture.
I consider the Romantic era as a transitional period characterized by a pre-modernist focus on identity formation and legibility. The widespread cultural shift toward a world of faces and figures foreshadows today’s world of increasingly available self-reflections and depictions.
So I invented the term “portraitive mode” to describe a diversity of cultural and material expressions of identity—visual and verbal portraits, miniatures, poetry, collections, caricatures, and biographical dictionaries.
The book integrates portraiture within broader cultural currents such as fashion and consumption, the rise of celebrity culture, collecting and house museums, and travel literature.
My focus is on synthesizing different kinds of material—tying together diverse artistic, literary, and cultural modes to shed new light on the historical significance of portraits and the centrality of Romantic portraiture as a vehicle for expression and subjective exploration.
An important aspect of the book is its examination of individuals who contributed to this phenomenon in innovative ways, or who exemplified the portraitive reflex.
Josiah Wedgwood, for instance, took great care to create chinaware that would reflect consumers’ conception of British character, and in the process established his own character and self-portrayal as the “face” of British table services. Sir John Soane, the architect, designed his house museum as a self-portrait, particularly rooms such as his Gothic parlor that contain biographical references; he “published” this self-portrayal by making his museum open to the public. Mary Robinson and Lord Byron used their popular personae to dramatize self-portraits that could enhance their literary careers and fame.
Many of the techniques pioneered in this period for creating self-portraits, manipulating public exposure, and combining biographical and pictorial portrayals are ones still in use in today’s self-conscious culture.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Fashioning Faces, a cross-disciplinary study, looks at how literary and visual portraiture in the British Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture.
I consider the Romantic era as a transitional period characterized by a pre-modernist focus on identity formation and legibility. The widespread cultural shift toward a world of faces and figures foreshadows today’s world of increasingly available self-reflections and depictions.
So I invented the term “portraitive mode” to describe a diversity of cultural and material expressions of identity—visual and verbal portraits, miniatures, poetry, collections, caricatures, and biographical dictionaries.
The book integrates portraiture within broader cultural currents such as fashion and consumption, the rise of celebrity culture, collecting and house museums, and travel literature.
My focus is on synthesizing different kinds of material—tying together diverse artistic, literary, and cultural modes to shed new light on the historical significance of portraits and the centrality of Romantic portraiture as a vehicle for expression and subjective exploration.
An important aspect of the book is its examination of individuals who contributed to this phenomenon in innovative ways, or who exemplified the portraitive reflex.
Josiah Wedgwood, for instance, took great care to create chinaware that would reflect consumers’ conception of British character, and in the process established his own character and self-portrayal as the “face” of British table services. Sir John Soane, the architect, designed his house museum as a self-portrait, particularly rooms such as his Gothic parlor that contain biographical references; he “published” this self-portrayal by making his museum open to the public. Mary Robinson and Lord Byron used their popular personae to dramatize self-portraits that could enhance their literary careers and fame.
Many of the techniques pioneered in this period for creating self-portraits, manipulating public exposure, and combining biographical and pictorial portrayals are ones still in use in today’s self-conscious culture.