0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life," Vernon Lee embarks on an intellectual exploration that fuses aesthetics with autobiographical musings, revealing the integral relationship between art and the human experience. Lee's prose is marked by its lyrical precision and philosophical depth, offering readers insights into the nature of beauty and creativity through a series of essays that transcend conventional art criticism. Set against the backdrop of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time of vibrant artistic movements and evolving cultural landscapes, this work resonates with the tensions between tradition and modernity, urging readers to reconsider the ways in which art can illuminate life itself. Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget, was a prominent figure in the world of literary criticism and aesthetics. Her background in European art and literature, coupled with her unique perspective on identity and gender, profoundly influenced her writing. It is this rich tapestry of experiences that will allow readers to appreciate the nuanced reflections on art and its impact on personal and societal realms in "Laurus Nobilis." This book is highly recommended for readers interested in both art and philosophy, as well as those who seek to understand the broader cultural shifts of Lee's time. Her contemplative style invites an immersive reading experience that promises to inspire both artists and scholars alike, making it an indispensable addition to any thoughtful library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection, Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life, gathers Vernon Lee’s sustained reflections on the place of art within everyday conduct and collective ideals. Composed in the early twentieth century, it presents not a miscellany but a considered sequence of essays that speak to one another. Its purpose is to examine why beauty matters, how aesthetic habits shape character, and what obligations art may bear toward the wider world. By arranging discrete chapters around a common argument, the volume serves as a compact summa of Lee’s mature concerns in aesthetics and culture, inviting readers to test perceptions against reasoning.
These chapters are essays—critical, reflective, and argumentative—rather than fiction or verse. Lee draws on the languages of art criticism, moral philosophy, and cultural commentary, moving between examples from the visual arts, music, and the textures of social life. The prose is designed to persuade and to clarify, not to report archival research or to present imaginative narratives. Readers will encounter propositions, definitions, thought experiments, and illustrative cases intended to illuminate concepts such as taste, harmony, pleasure, and utility. The collection thus belongs to the tradition of essayistic aesthetics, offering a coherent body of reasoning accessible to general readers and specialists alike.
Across the book, unifying themes emerge: the use of beauty, the relation between delight and discipline, and the measure by which we call pleasures wholesome or wasteful. Lee considers harmony not merely as a musical metaphor but as an ethical and civic desideratum; she weighs the autonomy of art against claims of usefulness; and she explores how landscape and setting affect sensibility. The volume’s title evokes the bay laurel, a classical emblem of art, suggesting a discourse attentive to inheritance and responsibility. Throughout, the aim is to connect aesthetic feeling with sanity of judgment, without reducing art to moral instruction.
Lee’s style is lucid, unsentimental, and classically proportioned. She favors precise distinctions, carefully staged transitions, and an urbane, conversational address that presumes an alert, reasoning reader. The argument advances cumulatively, with terms defined and revised as new examples appear. Allusions to history and to common experience function as tests of principle rather than ornaments. The essays avoid dogmatism by inviting counter-considerations, yet they maintain a disciplined preference for clarity, measure, and civic-mindedness. This poise—combining analytic patience with humane concern—marks the collection as a distinctive contribution to English-language writing on aesthetics in the early twentieth century.
The individual chapters take up their questions in turn. The Use of Beauty asks what, if anything, beauty is for. Nisi Citharam reflects on the claims of art in the scale of human needs. Higher Harmonies considers the kinds of order that please the mind and steady conduct. Beauty and Sanity links aesthetic balance to prudence in living. The Art and the Country ponders how art relates to place and to rural life. Art and Usefulness examines the tests by which we plead utility. Wasteful Pleasures interrogates indulgences that squander attention or vitality.
Taken together, these essays offer a framework for thinking about art that avoids the stalemate between absolute autonomy and strict social instrumentality. They show how aesthetic experience can refine perception, temper desire, and prompt care for environments and communities, without being subordinated to propaganda or mere diversion. The book remains pertinent wherever debates arise about cultural value, education, and the economies of leisure. Its vocabulary of harmony, measure, and use enables readers to assess tastes and habits with generosity and rigor, encouraging a practice of criticism rooted in everyday choices as well as in encounters with artworks.
Readers approaching this collection will find a sustained conversation rather than a catechism. Each chapter stands on its own while reinforcing a central inquiry into the meaning of beauty and the conduct it encourages. The sequence rewards slow reading and comparison, as definitions from early chapters are tested in later ones. As an introduction to Vernon Lee’s thought on aesthetics—and as a self-contained exploration of art’s claims upon life—Laurus Nobilis offers intellectual companionship of an unusually civil and demanding kind, reminding us that clear thinking about pleasure is itself a form of care for the world we share.
Historical Context
Vernon Lee (1856–1935), born Violet Paget in Boulogne-sur-Mer and long resident at Il Palmerino near Florence, wrote Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life at the transition from late Victorian to Edwardian culture. Issued by John Lane, The Bodley Head (London) and the John Lane Company (New York) in 1909, the volume reflects her cosmopolitan life across Italy, Britain, Germany, and France. Lee moved within Anglo-Italian expatriate circles and corresponded with major writers, notably Henry James. Her essays arise from a career that interrogated art’s powers and limits amid industrialization, scientific method, and mass education, bringing European debates on beauty, ethics, and social responsibility into a single reflective frame.
Lee’s oeuvre engages the legacy of the Aesthetic Movement and its critics. Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) had proposed a sensuous, individualist cultivation of experience, while John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold advanced moral and civic obligations for culture. After the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895, questions about aestheticism’s social legitimacy sharpened. Writing between Italy and England, Lee re-situated Renaissance models—Florence, Venice, Rome—as living interlocutors for modern society. Across her chapters, she mediates between Paterian self-fashioning and Ruskinian reform, considering how “the use of beauty” might survive public scrutiny and contribute to character, judgment, and collective life in the decades around 1900.
The rise of experimental psychology provided Lee with new tools for aesthetics. Wilhelm Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory (1879), Gustav Fechner’s psychophysics (1860), and Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlung (empathy) framed perception as an active, measurable process. Lee’s collaboration with Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson in the 1890s explored posture, breathing, and bodily response before artworks; these inquiries culminated in Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies (John Lane, 1912). In dialogue with William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), she tested how rhythm, form, and attention stabilize or disturb the self. This psychological turn underpins discussions of “beauty and sanity,” higher order harmonies, and the disciplined, ethical value she ascribes to aesthetic experience.
Music, long privileged as the abstract art, structures Lee’s reflections on form and feeling. Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) and Hermann von Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone (1863) codified debates about absolute versus program music that intensified with Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth premieres (from 1876) and the London Wagner Society (founded 1872). Lee’s international life kept her attentive to Italian opera traditions and German symphonic culture alike. When she weighs the claims of “higher harmonies” or hints, with nisi citharam, at music’s special status, she addresses a Europe where orchestras, choral societies, and concert halls had become laboratories for moral sentiment, communal discipline, and refined attention.
The Arts and Crafts movement furnished Lee with a social horizon for beauty’s “use.” Inspired by William Morris’s socialism and craft ethic, and by Ruskin’s critique of mechanized labor, reformers like C. R. Ashbee and W. R. Lethaby sought to reunite design, skill, and everyday life. Preservation campaigns—Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), and the National Trust founded by Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter, and Hardwicke Rawnsley (1895)—linked art to place. From Tuscany’s hill towns to English villages, Lee observed how workmanship, landscape, and memory cohere. Her meditations on art and the country, and on art’s usefulness, are rooted in these Anglo-Italian experiments in craft, heritage, and civic stewardship.
Modern leisure and consumption formed the counter-environment against which Lee measured aesthetic discipline. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) diagnosed conspicuous consumption as waste; new emporia like Selfridges (opened 1909) and international tourism—expanded by Thomas Cook’s rail itineraries and grand hotels from the Riviera to Venice—reorganized desire, time, and crowds. Lee, who chronicled travel and historic cities, saw how spectacle, advertising, and seasonal resorts redefined pleasure. Her concern with “wasteful pleasures” addresses this economy of distraction, asking how cultivated perception might resist novelty for novelty’s sake and convert enjoyment into sustained attention, ethical choice, and social economy in the early twentieth-century metropolis.
Contemporary anxieties about mental balance and cultural “degeneration” also shape Lee’s insistence on sanity in aesthetics. Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892) popularized the pathologizing of modern art; neurasthenia entered medical and literary vocabularies; philanthropic reform targeted hygiene, housing, and temperance. Lee reframed beauty as a regimen of composure and judgment rather than intoxication, aligning perception with self-government. Though Laurus Nobilis predates the Great War, her later pacifist tract Satan the Waster (1920) reveals continuity: she opposed the squandering of life and attention by militarism and mass hysteria. The collection thus anticipates a modern ethics in which aesthetic habits safeguard psychological and civic equilibrium.
Lee’s arguments were enabled by transnational print and museum cultures. The Bodley Head network had earlier fostered daring aesthetics around The Yellow Book (1894–1897), while the South Kensington Museum—renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899—promoted design literacy. In Florence, Anglo-American salons and scholars, including Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, advanced Renaissance connoisseurship. Women’s intellectual visibility—the “New Woman,” suffrage campaigns (notably in Britain from 1906 to 1914), and university openings—broadened Lee’s public. Moving between archives, galleries, and lecture rooms from London to Rome, she forged a comprehensive case for beauty’s civic, psychological, and practical claims that encompasses every chapter gathered in 1909.
Synopsis (Selection)
THE USE OF BEAUTY.
Lee argues that beauty has practical value in shaping perception, feeling, and conduct. It offers disinterested pleasure and order that improves individual and civic life without reducing art to didactic ends.
NISI CITHARAM.
Using music as an emblem of pure aesthetic rapture, Lee weighs the allure of art for art’s sake against the claims of ordinary life. She cautions that devotion to art should not become an evasion of responsibility or reality.
HIGHER HARMONIES.
Examines the impulse to read cosmic or moral harmonies into art. Lee distinguishes genuine aesthetic consonance from vague metaphysical claims, urging a sober linkage between beauty and conduct.
BEAUTY AND SANITY.
Connects healthy taste with mental hygiene and social balance. Lee advocates clear, moderate, life-serving aesthetic habits over morbid or sensationalist indulgence.
THE ART AND THE COUNTRY.
Considers how environment—city and countryside—shapes the making and enjoyment of art. Lee argues for diffusing art into everyday settings and rural life, so beauty supports work, rest, and community.
ART AND USEFULNESS.
Reconciles utility and beauty by showing how design, craft, and civic art can serve practical ends while remaining truly aesthetic. Lee rejects both crude utilitarianism and sterile luxury.
WASTEFUL PLEASURES.
Critiques extravagant, resource-draining amusements that blunt perception and burden society. She recommends simpler, sustainable pleasures that renew attention and foster genuine aesthetic experience.
