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M. Percival, M. Adrien (dir.), Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture

M. Percival, M. Adrien (dir.), Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Emma Burridge)

Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture

Edited by Melissa Percival and Muriel Adrien

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020:04

ISBN: 9781789620030, 325 pages with 69 black & white illustrations, £65.00

 

Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This collection of essays foregrounds fancy – and its close synonym, caprice – as a distinct strand of the imagination in the period. As a prevalent, coherent and enduring concept in aesthetics and visual culture, it deserves a more prominent place in scholarly understanding than it has hitherto occupied. Emphasizing commonalities between visual productions in different media from diverse locations, the authors interrogate and celebrate the expressive freedom of fancy in European visual culture.

  • Identifies fancy as a creative act, a type of production, and a mode of reception, the common threads being freedom and pleasure.
  • The first book to link the concept of fancy across visual media and across Europe during the long 18th-century.
  • Argues that fancy should be taken seriously despite its reputation for triviality and whimsicality.

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Table of Contents :

List of figures
Acknowledgements

Melissa Percival - Introduction
Emmanuel Faure-Carricaburu - The fantasy figures of Jean-Baptiste Santerre and the limits of generic frameworks of interpretation
Christophe Guillouet - The Parisian world of printmaking at the heart of the invention of a genre? Poilly, Courtin and Bonnart’s fantaisies (1713-1728)
John Chu - Windows of opportunity: the French fantasy figure and the spirit of enterprise in early-eighteenth-century Europe
Martin Postle - Modelling for the fancy picture in eighteenth-century England
Bénédicte Miyamoto - The influence of drawing manuals on the British practice and reception of fancy pictures
Guillaume Faroult - A galant fantasy: Fragonard’s fantasy figures and The Music lesson in relation to Van Dyck, Watteau and Carle Vanloo
Pierre-Henri Biger - Fans, fantasy and fancy
Melissa Percival - Fancy as a mode of consumption
Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding – ‘A butterfly supporting an elephant’: chinoiserie, fantaisie and ‘the luxuriance of fancy’
Laurent Châtel - The garden as capriccio: the hortulan pleasures of imagination and virtuality
Béatrice Laurent - Grand Tour capricci
Xavier Cervantes - Venetian reminiscences and cultural hybridity in Canaletto's English-period capricci and vedute
Adrián Fernández Almoguera - From the private cabinet to the suburban villa: caprices and fantasies in eighteenth-century Madrid
Andrew Schulz - Satire and fantasy in Goya’s Caprichos
Alice Labourg – ‘Fancy paints with hues unreal’: pictorial fantasy and literary creation in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels

Summaries
List of contributors
Bibliography
Index

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Melissa Percival is Professor of French, Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on theories of facial expression, fantasy figures and portraits, with particular reference to eighteenth-century France; these include a monograph on Fragonard’s fantasy figures.

Muriel Adrien is Associate Professor of art history and visual culture within the English Department at the University of Toulouse. She has published numerous articles on 18th and 19th-century British and American art, especially as related to scientific context. She is chief editor of the online scholarly journal Miranda.

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The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.