2025/07/14 by Daniel Whiting · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayaf031
openalex publication_date 2025/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In this groundbreaking and fascinating book, Alison Stone offers a detailed and thoughtful study of the contributions made by a series of women in Britain to the philosophy of art in the ‘long’ nineteenth century. The principal protagonists are Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee, although several more receive detailed discussion in the closing chapter. There is no doubt that Stone succeeds in revealing each of the main players to have developed interesting and distinctive positions on issues central to philosophy art—then and now—and so to deserve serious consideration by future scholars. One might wonder if anything unites the above figures beyond spatiotemporal proximity and gender. Stone demonstrates persuasively that they all share a central concern with the relationship between, on the one hand, art and, on the other hand, religion and morality—which in the nineteenth-century context tended to go hand in hand. She characterizes the chronological development in terms of a pendulum, swinging first towards a view according to which art is good only if it is morally edifying and religiously significant, then towards a view on which art is good only if freed from moral and religious content, then back towards a middle ground (p. 15). While this topic serves as a unifying thread, plenty of others receive attention along the way. Stone discusses, for example, Barbauld’s treatment of the paradox of tragedy (pp. 39–44), Jameson’s conception of the canon (pp. 144–47), and Cobbe’s analysis of artistic genius (pp. 149–61).