Pre-Raphaelite

1. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics

2. Pre-Raphaelite Short introduction : • The Pre-Raphaelites are one of the most important poetic groups of Victorian England. They are also called the 'sub-Tennysonian' group of poets sometimes. The major names involved are Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris and so on. Some of them were also painters like D.G. Rossetti himself. The Brotherhood of the Pre-Raphaelites were established in 1848 and they brought out a magazine called The Germ. Other members of the group were Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. • They named themselves after the Renaissance master of painting Raphael and tried to go back to the painting styles that were dominant before him by returning to the Middle Ages.

3. Early Doctrines: • The brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: • to have genuine ideas to express. • to study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them. • to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote. • most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

4. General View : • Some of the most significant features of their work are : • 1. The use of Medieval forms like ballad and so on. • 2. Strong pictorial quality. • 3. Lyricism and Romantic subjectivism. • 4. Emphasis on colors and numbers. • 5. Fleshliness and sensuality. • 6. Art for Art's sake or an aestheticistic position and spirit, not caring much for the social function of art.

5. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Medieval Elements and Art. The Pre-Raphaelites are group of artists, poets, and critics who, during late Victorian England, admired and emulated late Medieval or Proto-Renaissance art. This type of art dates back to a time prior to the appearance of artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo.

6. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Language , Sounds , and Music. poetry also has an ornamental or decorative function: “a definite, harmonious, conscious beauty .. . . It ought to be possible for a painting to be part of a beautiful whole in a room or a church or hall.” - Morris.

7. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Images. “A detailed focus upon sacramentally resonant, often symbolic and typological nature images; a concern with palpably realized emotional suffering and with death, often producing poems that stress mutability, that expose a Romantic quest for permanence”

8. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Naturalism and Sensuousness . “Like Rossetti most Pre-Raphaelites were painters as well as poets. That explains much of the sensuousness of their poetry as well as their loving concern for details. Much of their ”poetry is as concrete as painting. “ According to Ruskin, the love of natural objects (especially plants) for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, ”unconstrained by artistical laws.

9. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Themes. • 1-They often took the form of REALISM , characterized by: • A heavy use of descriptive detail . • The love of color, light and prevision . • 2-SUPERNATURALISM: • It is reflected by the TENDENCY toward symbols • which are often mysterious . • 3- the use of vaguely medieval-sounding words.

10. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: Themes. 4-Frequent use of subjects that are innately POIGNANT, MELANCHOLY, OR MORBID . 5- Pre-Raphaelite poetry has an ORNAMENTAL OR DECORATIVE function served by the tendency toward unreal, incantatory reverie, toward a vague intangible mood created by colors and sounds alone.

11. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Morals and Thoughts. • By means of the creation of a heightened reality and natural symbolism, the Pre-Raphaelites aimed to engage the modern imagination and consciousness. • the subjects and themes of many Pre-Raphaelite works indicate a continued fascination with the medieval past . The Pre-Raphaelites were essentially interested in establishing a moral truthfulness in art and literature.

12. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Tendency. Rossetti, himself a painter (and a poet as well), felt that contemporary paintings had become too formal, academic, and unrealistic. He desired to see it taken back to the realism, sensuousness, and devotion to detail which characterize the art of the Italian painters before Raphael.

13. Led by Rossetti some painters organized themselves in London in 1848 into a group which came to be called the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Apart from Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Millais, Thomas Woolner, and James Collinson were the important members of this group. In painting, they broke the shackles of stereotyped traditions. The creed of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was "an entire adherence to the simplicity of art." Ruskin, who came to champion the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites in the teeth of severe opposition, said that "they imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only." And again: "Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch in the open air from the thing itself...Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner." And when he said this, he said a great deal. The anti-conventionalism of the Pre-Raphaelites marks them as neo-romantics

14. Pre-Raphaelite Literature Characteristics: • Aesthetic views. Rossetti and his follower Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) emphasized themes of eroticized medievalism (or medievalized eroticism) and pictorial techniques that produced moody atmosphere. This form of Pre-Raphaelitism has most relevance to poetry; for although the earlier combination of a realistic style with elaborate symbolism appears in a few poems, particularly those of the Rossetti's, this second stage finally had the most influence upon literature.

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