Title: Signs for the times :
Authors: Brooks, Chris.
Date: 1984
Publisher: G. Allen & Unwin,
Physical description: xiv, 202 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 23 cm
Language: English
LC classification: N
Abstract: This book explores imaginative and creative relationships between three major areas of mid-Victorian arts: literature, painting and architecture. Through the detailed critical analysis of particular novels, prose writings, paintings and buildings, the author establishes a fusion of realistic and symbolic values that he sees as central to Victorian creative imagination. He argues that the creative achievement of the mid-nineteenth century needs to be seen far more as a whole than it has been previously, and that fundamental imaginative terms are common to art and architecture, and major theoretical writers. -- Publisher description
Contents: 'Flame images': Carlyle and the symbolic reading of history -- 'The magic reel': metaphor and reality in "The old curiosity shop" -- 'What the waves were always saying': symbolic realism in "Dombey and son" and "David Copperfield" -- 'Bricked in on all sides': symbolic exemplification in "Bleak house" and "Hard Times" -- 'The prison of this lower world': reality and the transcendental in "Little Dorrit" -- 'Recalled to life': the Christian myth of "A tale of two cities" -- 'Our feverish contact fly': Arnold and the symbol in retreat -- 'Bona fide imitation': pictorial realism and "Modern painters" -- 'The world without eyelids': symbolic realism and pre-Raphaelite painting -- 'Things as they really are': four pre-Rahpaelite pictures -- "Functional and mystical': architectural meaning and Puginian gothic -- 'Making the building speak': symbolism and the gothic revival -- 'Without flow or continuity': the architectural semantic of William Butterfield.
Notes: Includes index.
Subject headings (LCSH): Arts, British.; Arts, Victorian--Great Britain.; Realism in art--Great Britain.; Symbolism in art--Great Britain.