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" The British avant-garde : "
Guy, Josephine M.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1098791
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| Doc. No
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TLets552781
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| Main Entry
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Guy, Josephine M.
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| Title & Author
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The British avant-garde :\ Guy, Josephine M.
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| College
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University of Birmingham
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| Date
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1990
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| student score
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1990
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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The aim of this thesis is to relocate the work of somelate nineteenth-century British writers, including Walter Pater,Oscar Wilde and William Morris, within the history of the avantgarde.This is carried out in two ways. First, I examine andcriticize on both theoretical and methodological grounds,current theories of the avant-garde, focusing particularly onthe work of Renato Poggioli and Peter Burger. In their place Ioutline a new theory, based on some premisses derived fromthe philosophy of intellectual history, which attempts toestablish the intellectual conditions which make avant-gardeactivities possible. In this new theory I argue that the politicsof avant-garde movements are culturally and historicallyspecific. I then use this theory to establish the conditions foravant-garde activity in late nineteenth-century Britain. Thisundertaking involves an examination of general intellectualdevelopments which took place in Britain in the last quarter ofthe nineteenth century; more precisely, it entails describingthe intellectual changes which took place in political economy,historiography and sociology, for I suggest that these changes,by problematizing concepts of society and of history, both madeBritish avant-garde activity possible, and determined the formsit took. The second part of this thesis examines the work ofthe above mentioned writers - Pater, Morris and Wilde - in the context of these wider intellectual and cultural changes. Isuggest that the subversive political implications - and hencethe avant-gardism - of their work may only be properlyassessed in such a context.
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| Added Entry
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University of Birmingham
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