Other publications
- Thomas Hardy, The World of His Novels
- Rossetti, painter and poet
- Continental Crosscurrents
- Byzantium Rediscovered
- The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing
-
The Pre-Raphaelite Body:
Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry and Criticism -
The Expressive Eye:
Vision and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy - Other publications
Rossetti, painter and poet
Rossetti, painter and poet is a critical biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that examines the relationship between his art and his writing in the context of his life. Bullen’s premise is that Rossetti was a courageous pioneer in the late-nineteenth-century world of evasion and repression. He dared to explore the hidden recesses of the mind and to claim that the libido was a driving force in human life. Both Rossetti’s art and his poetry were castigated for their ‘fleshliness’ but Bullen maintains that in his painting and in his poetry Rossetti’s focus on the erotic life was a way of asserting the centrality of the sexual drive. His subject was the female psyche and the female body, and pictures that for so long were dismissed as merely decorative and repetitive are in fact part of a project on Rossetti’s part to explore what was considered to be the dark side of life. Illustrated with 250 plates mostly in colour, this book presents a new account of the life and work of perhaps the most vibrant figure in nineteenth century art.
- Rossetti, painter and poet
- London. Frances Lincoln. 2011.
- 270 pages
- ISBN 978 0 7112 3225 9
- Buy it here
- 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Anatomy of Desire'
from Oxford Today, Michaelmas 2011. View the pdf - 'Rossetti and the allure of the Pre-Raphaelite woman'
from Cassone (subscription required to read this review) View
