| The Renaissance and English Modernism examines the structures and contents of various late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English texts of cultural, art, and literary history; the interdisciplinary contexts in which such histories were written; and the centrality of the Renaissance as a period concept in these texts. After a brief genealogy of the Renaissance concept in Europe through the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of the Italian Renaissance as a period term in texts of Ruskin, Burckhardt, Symonds, Arnold, and Pater is analyzed. In these texts the Italian Renaissance is theorized to be the origins of three interrelated concepts---modernity, nations, and culture---that together constitute a historical "structure of feeling" that influences the subsequent writing of cultural history. I then examine various fields---art history, poetry, Shakespeare activities, and literary history---in which this cluster of concepts shapes the writing of cultural history, the theorizing of art and literature, and the formation of cultural institutions in England from 1880 to 1920. Such analysis shows how two ideas foundational to twentieth-century English art and literary studies---modernism and nationalism---were not mutually exclusive, as has been traditionally believed. As writers as diverse as Berenson, Fry, Hulme, Pound, Saintsbury, and Raleigh related the Italian Renaissance and the Elizabethan Age to contemporary English culture, they imitated the typological and allegorical structures of Italian Renaissance historiography. In the process, new notions of modern and national culture replaced religion as the conceptual framework for viewing historical time, and art and literature were theorized to have spiritual and social functions. Such analysis blurs the traditional boundaries between the Victorian and Modernist periods by showing how writers of both modern and national cultural history rejected modernity as they returned to the model of an earlier period and tried to move the nation and its culture forward in its development. By restoring modernism to its nationalist concerns and by showing how nationalist "Victorians" employed elements of modernism, this project recasts aesthetic and literary modernism as a concern for the spiritual and the social rather than merely for the formal and the new. |
