• Art History and Visual Culture
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• no.22
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• pp.254-279
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• 2018

This essay traces the origin and the social function of medieval knights in Edwin Austin Abbey's murals ${\ll}$The Quest of the Holy Grail${\gg}$ in the Boston Public Library. Medieval knights in the Arthurian legend appeared in American novels at the end of 1850s and in political cartoons in the 1870s. They are featured in American Renaissance murals as well. ${\ll}$The Quest of the Holy Grail${\gg}$ painted in 1895 was the first of its kind. In Britain, the Pre-Raphaelites frequently painted medieval knights. Abbey fused the visual idiom of the Pre-Raphaelites and that of the Royal Academy of Arts in his depiction of knights. Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, who usually focused on knights' activities, he emphasized their virtue. His representation of knights reflect the social and economic crises in America in the 1890s. After the Civil War, American society enjoyed economic prosperity but suffered from government corruption, economic inequality, and class conflict. Serious social problems such as poverty and inequality decayed American society. Writers and artists brought attention to these issues. This essay argues that Abbey criticized capitalists and expressed his hope for progress through the figure of Galahad as the iconic representation of civic virtue in ${\ll}$The Quest of the Holy Grail${\gg}$. Installed in the Boston Public Library, Abbey's murals performed a public function to warn the viewers of economic and social chaos resulting from government corruption. Abbey's American knights not only emphasized moral responsibility but also promoted patriotism. The artist refashioned medieval knights into American citizens, whose civic virtue became essential to an ideal leader in American society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.241-257
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• 2009

The essay discusses the way in which the aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelites reformulates the habitual system of knowledge in the Victorian age by adapting $Ranci{\acute{e}}re^{\prime}s$ concept of aesthetics. $Ranci{\acute{e}}re$ develops an original theory of aesthetics, a regime of knowledge which enables to perceive and reflect art as such. In this way, aesthetics turns to be the logical system by which the consensus idea of the beautiful comes to exist. For $Ranci{\acute{e}}re$, aesthetics is an agreed system of the sensible and reproduces the habitual knowledge of the world. Therefore, a new aesthetic movement means an attempt to break the given aesthetics and reorients the new distribution of the sensible. The important point of $Ranci{\acute{e}}re^{\prime}s$ argument is that he does not presuppose the dimension beyond the present unlike Frankfurt School. What $Ranci{\acute{e}}re$ claims is that there is no such the aesthetic which can correct the instrumental reason, but rather an indifferent moment in which a worker finds out himself as a creator who can give rise to the new regime of the sensible and feels free from what he must work for. From this perspective, the essay explores the aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelites and its meaning in nineteenth century Britain. Pre-Raphaelites was an artist group who railed against a so-called academic style of paintings and created a new aesthetic criterion to describe the truth of the natural world. The essay examines the interrelationship between Pre-Raphaelites and photography that would enable them to re-distribute the sensible and produce a new way of seeing the order of things. This is related to the birth of a modern gaze as in the case of landscape paintings. What is crucial is that the distribution of the sensible is always-already doubled with the political. In short, Pre-Raphaeltes is not only an aesthetic movement but also a political pursuit to achieve a disenchanted perception of nineteenth century industrial capitalism.