Victorian Medievalism in Literature and the Other Arts

FAIN: FB-13274-77

John A. Carstens
Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA 23284-9005)

To study the extent of and the reasons for the Victorians fascination with medieval subjects, settings, designs, and ideas. In poetry, novel, prose, architecture, painting, and design, PI will seek instances of the use of medieval designs or methods and will attempt to determine whether Victorian Medievalism was the result of a taste for the picturesque, of a desire for escape from a changing society into ashore fixed seeming world, or of a serious attempt to revive the remnants of a former age in order to improve the present.