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" Four Critics : "
Williams, Gordon
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1097676
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| Doc. No
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TLets519516
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| Main Entry
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Williams, Gordon
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| Title & Author
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Four Critics :\ Williams, Gordon
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| College
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Leeds Metropolitan University
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| Date
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2007
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| student score
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2007
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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This thesis is concerned with readings of sculpture in Britain between 1900 and1960, particularly by Ezra Pound, Adrian Stokes, Herbert Read and John Berger.The ideas on sculpture of each of the critics are examined in individual chapters.The study concentrates on texts that illustrate the diversity of literary forms inwhich accounts of sculpture were constructed. Those discussed include memoir,travel writing, biography, journalism and the novel. The study examines theliterary and art historical traditions that had a bearing on the thought andmethods of the four critics and identifies common themes in their writing. Theseinclude the figure of the sculptor, sculpture and memory, sculpture and war. Itscentral concern, however, is with the literary forms and emplotment of theirnarratives.The key findings of the thesis indicate that whereas some critics modified longestablishedgenres others experimented with innovative literary and visual forms.It is argued that these choices were affected by the polemical intentions of theirwriting. They raided the history of art to construct lineages for contemporary artand to propose new forms of sculptural and literary production. Other factors thathad a bearing on the form, emplotment and language of their accounts - the lateinstitutionalisation of art history in Britain, the need to differentiate their writingfrom past and contemporary aesthetic, literary and art historical traditions,politics, their complicity with sculptors and connections with each other - areidentified. Their writing, it is argued, constituted a powerful story about modernistsculpture in which carving, abstraction, the engagement with contemporary lifeand a highly individualised notion of the artist came to the fore.
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| Added Entry
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Leeds Metropolitan University
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