This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors and musicians imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response.
It aims to map the state of the field in this growing area of interest for nineteenth-century scholars by locating recent interdisciplinary work on sentimentality and art and writing and the senses within wider debates about the relationship between psychology and aesthetics in the long-nineteenth century.
Speakers will investigate the physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception and the mind/body interactions at play in the experience of a wide range of arts.
Key questions include:
- How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised?
- What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response?
- What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians?
- Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?
A link to information about the Victorian Sentimentality display at Tate Britain co-curated by Nicola Bown, Victoria Mills and Alison Smith in 2012 can be found on the Tate website.