Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century

Cover: Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century
Editor(s)
Jennifer Milam

Editor(s)
Nicola Parsons

Hardback
January 2022 • ISBN 9781644532324 • $150.00

Paperback
January 2022 • ISBN 9781644532331 • $41.95

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Series
Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture

This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nochol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two strands of interest are explored by the individual authors. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist’s physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Through a consideration of the material formation of concepts, this book explores questions that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, and designed forms. In doing so, it introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

About the Editors

Jennifer Milam is the Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Excellence) at the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia. Her books on rococo art include Historical Dictionary of Rococo ArtFragonard’s Playful Paintings, and an edited collection Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

Nicola Parsons is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England. 

Reviews of 'Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century'

Making Ideas Visible is an important collection that will appeal to scholars from a variety of disciplines. Those teaching early-modern literature and history will find useful representations of ideas that are often less accessible in printed texts. Many of the book’s images will find a home in my instructional materials, and the authors’ insightful interpretations will inform our class discussions. Milam and Parsons should be congratulated for selecting such keen essays, each of which is handsomely produced and carefully documented.
- Christopher D. Johnson, Francis Marion University
Together, the essays in [Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century] address visual culture from social, historical, and artistic contexts in an intellectually rigorous yet accessible style that will satisfy specialist and non-specialist readers alike. [...] This excellent anthology will appeal to a wide audience interested in new ways of seeing eighteenth-century visual arts and culture.
- Louise Voll Box, The Johnston Collection in Melbourne, Australia