Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century

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 Nichol 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.

JENNIFER MILAM is the Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Excellence) at the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia. She has been head of the School of Culture and Communications and a professor of art history at the University of Melbourne, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, director of the Sydney Intellectual History Network and a professor of art history and eighteenth-century studies at the University of Sydney. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research interests include rococo art, patronage, curatorial studies, museum practice, intellectual history and garden design. Her books on rococo art include Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings, and an edited collection Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Curator: The Museum Journal, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Art History and The Burlington Magazine. Milam’s current projects focus on issues of cosmopolitanism and national identity in garden design, and the cultural history of plants during the Enlightenment.

NICOLA PARSONS is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney in Australia. Her research is focused on eighteenth-century literature and cultural history. She is especially interested in reading practices and forms of literary sociability. Her first book, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England, concentrates on texts by Delariver Manley, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Edmund Curll and Jane Barker and shows how gossip modelled an interpretative strategy that shaped readers’ participation in both literary culture and in public debates. She has published articles on Delarivier Manley, Queen Anne’s correspondence with the Duchess of Marlborough, and Jane Barker.