Medieval revival through the lens of gender: Julia Margaret cameron’s photos to the idylls of the king and other poems by Alfred Tennyson
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5433/2237-9126.2017v11n20p119Keywords:
Medievalism, Gender, Photography.Abstract
One of the first female photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is the author of hundreds of portraits and tableaux vivants. Although influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, famous at her time, her tableaux vivants rend the artist’s own version of the Middle Ages – somewhat different from her contemporaries’: less heroic and more intimate, where women play some of the most important roles. In order to understand her ideas on these subjects, we will analyze here a group of pictures she took in 1874 to illustrate Alfred Tennyson’s poems on Arthurian tales The Idylls of the King (and also five other poems marked by the medieval revival). We will also make use of some comparisons with another set of images illustrating the same work: the 36 engravings made by the French illustrator Gustave Doré between 1867 and 1868.Downloads
References
ARMSTRONG, Carol. Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography. October, v. 76, 1996, p. 114-141.
BRÄCHER, Andréa. Julia Margaret Cameron e a fotografia de Madonas. In: GERALDO, Sheila Cabo; COSTA, Luiz Cláudio (Org.). Anais do Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pesquisadores em Artes Plásticas. Rio de Janeiro: ANPAP, 2012. p. 1352-1361.
CAMERON, Julia Margaret. Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems. London: Henry S. King and Company, 1875, 2 v.
CAMERON, Julia Margaret. The Annals of My Glass House. In: NEWHALL, Beaumont (Ed.). Photography, Essays and Images. Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography. New York/Boston: MoMA/New Graphic Society, 1980, p. 135- 139.
CAWS, Mary Ann; JOSEPH, Gerhard. Naming and Not Naming: Tennyson and Mallarmé. Victorian Poetry, v. 43, n. 1, 2005, p. 1-18.
COX, Julian; FORD, Colin. Julia Margaret Cameron. The complete photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003.
DORÉ, Gustave. Doré’s illustrations for Idylls of the King. New York: Dover, 1995.
FORD, Colin. A Pre-Raphaelite Partnership: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Robert Parsons. The Burlington Magazine, v. 146, n. 1214, 2004, p. 308-318.
FREUD, Sigmund. O Moisés de Michelângelo. In: FREUD, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci e uma lembrança de sua infância: o Moisés de Michelângelo. Tradução de Walderedo Ismael de Oliveira e Órizon Carneiro Muniz. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1997, p. 103-134.
FRY, Roger; WOOLF, Virginia. Victorian photographs of famous men and fair women. London: Hogarth Press, 1926.
GERNSHEIM, Helmut. Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work. Millerton: Aperture Press, 1975.
HARPER’S Weekly, v. XXI, n. 1079, September the 1st 1877. HILL, Marylu. “Shadowing Sense at war with Soul”: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographic Illustrations of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”. Victorian Poetry, v. 40, n. 4, 2002, p. 445-462.
LAURETIS, Teresa de. The technology of gender. In: LAURETIS, Teresa de. The technologies of gender. Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington/Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1983, p. 1-30.
LUKITSH, Joanne. Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographic Illustrations to Alfred Tennyson’s “The Idylls of the King”. In: FENSTER, Thelma (Ed.). Arthurian women. A casebook. New York: Routledge, 2015, 2 ed., p. 247-262.
LUPACK, Alan. Popular Images Derived from Tennyson’s Arthurian Poems. Arthuriana, v. 21, n. 2, 2011, p. 90-118.
OLSEN, Victoria C. Idylls of Real Life. Victorian Poetry, v. 33, n. 3/4, 1995, p. 371- 389.
PFORDRESHER, John. A Bibliographic History of Alfred Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”. Studies in Bibliography, v. 26, 1973, p. 193-218.
POLLOCK, Griselda. Woman as Sign in Pre-Rapahelite Literature. The Representation of Elizabeth Siddall. In: POLLOCK, Griselda. Vision and Difference. Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. London/New York: Routledge, 2003. 2 ed. p. 128-162.
ROSEN, Jeff. Julia Margaret Cameron’s “fancy subjects”. Photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
SAUNDERS, Clare Broome. Women writers and nineteenth-century medievalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
SIMMONS, Laurence. Rome II: The Monument of ornament. In: SIMMONS, Laurence. Freud’s Italian journey. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006, p. 214-245.
STAINES, David. Tennyson's Camelot: the Idylls of the King and its medieval sources. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982.
TENNYSON, Alfred. Idylls of the King. In: RICKS, Christopher (Ed.). The Poems of Tennyson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 3 v., v. 3.
TENNYSON, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. New York: Macmillan, 1897, 2 v.
THOMAS, Julia. Always another poem: Victorian illustrations of Tennyson. In: CHESHIRE, Jim et al. (Ed.). Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Visual Culture. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2009, p. 20-31.
WYNNE-DAVIES, Marion. “Thro’ the brilliant eye”: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls. In: WYNNE-DAVIES, Marion. Women and Arthurian Literature: Seizing the sword. London/New York: Macmillan, 1996, p. 150-161.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Domínios da Imagem adopts the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, therefore, the copyrights related to the published articles belong to the author(s), who grant the journal the exclusive right of first publication.
Under this license it is possible to: Share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon the material, giving due credit and providing a link to the license and indicating if changes were made.