« Culture for the Million, or Society as it may be », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, numéro 71: Colloques de la S.F.E.V.E. Strasbourg, 16-17 janvier 2009 « Culture savante et culture populaire », Escuret, Annie et Luc Bouvard (Dir.), Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2010, pp 355-66.
Résumé
When in the late nineteenth century Aestheticism slowly lost ground to the Arts and Crafts Movement and then to Decadence and Art Nouveau, the Vic- torian artistic field had considerably evolved. Freed from the moral task tradi- tionally assigned to it, English art now claimed its autonomy—“All art is quite useless”wroteWildeinthePrefacetoThePictureofDorianGrayin⇥ ⌦⇥—,rely- ing on a pictorial idiom which, in time, had become quite familiar to a large public. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role and function of the graphic arts in the Victorians’ familiarity with avant-garde theories. At a time when the demands of an enlarged readership triggered a remarkable develop- ment of periodical literature, the illustrated press was partly responsible for the circulation of the very ideals it meant to ridicule. From the vantage point o↵ered by such publications as The Illustrated London News and, of course, Punch, cartoons became the missing link between highbrow and lowbrow cul- ture, thus contributing to the long-lasting fascination exerted by Aestheticism on the rest of society.