New Book | Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life
From the University of Pennsylvania Press:
Catherine Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0812248234, $50.
Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic.
Exploring the intersection of the early republic’s material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual’s character and potential for republican citizenship.
Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.
Catherine E. Kelly is Associate Professor and L. R. Brammer Jr. Presidential Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She is author of In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: The American Republic of Taste
1 Learning Taste
2 Aesthetic Entrepreneurs
3 Picturing Race
4 Looking Past Loyalism
5 Waxing Political
6 Political Personae
Epilogue: The Nation’s Guest in the Republic of Taste
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
2015 Dissertation Listings from CAA
From caa.news (1 August 2016) . . .
caa.reviews has published the authors and titles of doctoral dissertations in art history and visual studies—both completed and in progress—from American and Canadian institutions for calendar year 2015. You may browse by listing date or by subject matter. Each entry identifies the student’s name, dissertation title, school, and advisor. Once a year, each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies submits dissertation titles to CAA for publication.
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The index for 2015 lists ten ‘eighteenth-century art’ dissertations completed, including:
• Katherine Arpen, “Pleasure and the Body: The Bath in Eighteenth-Century French Art and Architecture” (UNC Chapel Hill, M. Sheriff)
• Julie Boivin, “Horrid Beauty: Rococo Ornament and Contemporary Visual Culture” (Toronto, M. Cheetham)
• John Cooper, “Imperial Balls: The Arts of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1780–1870” (Yale, T. Barringer; R. Thompson)
• Meredith Gamer, “‘The Sheriff’s Picture Frame’: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century Britain” (Yale, T. Barringer)
• Elizabeth Lee Oliver, “Mercantile Aesthetics: Art, Science, and Diplomacy in French India (1664–1761)” (Northwestern, S. H. Clayson)
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and forty-four ‘eighteenth-century art’ dissertations in progress, including:
• Franny Brock, “Drawing the Amateur: Draftsmanship and the Amateur in Eighteenth-Century France” (UNC Chapel Hill, M. Sheriff)
• Ashley Bruckbauer, “Dangerous Liaisons: Ambassadors and Embassies in Eighteenth-Century French Art” (UNC Chapel Hill, M. Sheriff)
• Emily Casey, “Waterscapes: Representing the Sea in the American Imagination, 1760–1815” (Delaware, W. Bellion)
• Bernard Cesarone, “Redeeming Virgins and Heterodox Images in Enlightenment New Spain” (UIUC, O.Vázquez)
• Kathryn Desplanque, “Art, Commerce, and Caricature: Satirical Images of Artistic Life in Paris, 1750–1850” (Duke, N. McWilliam)
• Monica Hahn, “Go-Between Portraits and the Imperial Imagination, circa 1800” (Temple, T. Cooper)
• Joshua Hainy, “John Flaxman: Beyond the Line” (Iowa, D. Johnson)
• Alexandra Morrison, “Copying at the Louvre” (Yale, C. Armstrong)
• Sarah Sylvester Williams, “Dining Scenes by Nicolas Lancret” (Missouri, Columbia, M. Yonan)
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