Painting and the Politics of Culture

In recent years the study of British art, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been transformed. This has been the result of a general awareness of the theoretical issues involved in the study of culture and society, and the new emphasis given to the questions of class, race, and gender, which has produced a new, interdisciplinary approach to the study of British art. The essays in this book, all previously unpublished, are written by scholars from various disciplines, many of whom have been at the forefront of this transformation. There are essays on Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, Turner and Benjamin Robert Haydon; on the teaching of art to women, on eighteenth-century social theories of painting, and on the representation of industrial landscape, of femininity, and of "exotic" and oriental cultures. The result is a book which will be of equal interest to scholars and students of the history of art, literature, social history, cultural studies, and women's studies.