Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity

This is a useful survey of high Victorian critical values, and it helps prepare the way for a deeper understanding of Henry James and Oscar Wilde. * Choice * Graham's strengths are in her meticulous historical illustrations of her theoretical claims. -- Erica Haugtvedt, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Rapid City, South Dakota * Clio * Graham's is a book for which to feel grateful . . . Her determination to write both the homosociality and the (often denied) homoeroticism of the PRB men back into their story, and thus into cultural history, is an admirable animating purpose. That she does this, too, by means of such energetic, idiosyncratic, passionately engage prose makes her study a most welcome one. -- MARGARET D. STETZ, University of Delaware * English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 * This book should be welcomed by scholars working in Queer and Gender studies, whom it most directly addresses. Victorianists interested in the figure of the celebrity and the role played by periodicals will also value its detailed reception history. Scholars of Pre-Raphaelite art (and to a lesser extent, literature) will find some interesting and provocative claims to ponder. -- Elizabeth Helsinger * Cercles * Wendy Graham writes with engaging clarity and rigor about the curious homoeroticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the volatile sexual politics surrounding the careers of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Simeon Solomon in particular. With her subtle eye for the odd erotic enthusiasm, the conflicted allegiance, and the panicky equivocation, she takes a fresh and judicious look at the abundant mythmaking, journalistic backstabbing, and personal betrayals that attended the myriad Pre-Raphaelite challenges to Victorian conventions. -- Ellis Hanson, Cornell University Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity is chock full of insight. Graham wants us to think of Pre-Raphaelitism as not just a, but the crucial movement in the making of modern ideas of celebrity. Her concern is at once with the Pre-Raphaelites, and with the assortments of critical discourse that greeted their onset, shaped their contemporary reception, and continued to guide critical responses to them well after their supersession. She argues that there exists both within the PRB and its reception a persistent homosocial and often homoerotic dynamic, which shapes the ways we think about art movements and their possibilities. This is a distinguished and fascinating work. -- Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan