British Art: Histories and Interpretations since 1700
About the Book Series
This series exists to publish new and rigorous scholarship of the highest quality on British and Irish art after 1700. Proposals will offer new bodies of research or new interpretations, ideally both, and should demonstrate a clear awareness of the proposed volume's contribution to current and wider art-historical debates. We define British art broadly to mean art made in the British Isles or by British artists, and particularly welcome proposals which address the topic from international or comparative cultural perspectives. We also welcome proposals for intellectually ambitious studies concerning more localised areas, issues and themes within British and Irish art during this period. Above all, we encourage proposals for books on British and Irish art which transcend the descriptive in order to offer a broader methodological and/or historiographical contribution to the discipline of art history.
Spirituality, Feminism, and Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture
1st Edition
By Alice Eden
December 26, 2025
This book proposes new understandings of modern life in Britain by bringing constructs of female spirituality centre stage and examining three ‘forgotten’ artists identified with the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorianism. Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson are ...
Criticism, Art and Theory in 1970s Britain: The Critical War
1st Edition
By JJ Charlesworth
September 28, 2025
A critical study of the life of art criticism in the 1970s, this volume traces the evolution of art and art criticism in a pivotal period in post-war British history. JJ Charlesworth explores how art critics and the art press attempted to negotiate new developments in art, faced with the challenges...
Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Visual History in Britain
1st Edition
By Isabelle Baudino
March 12, 2025
Extending the scholarly discussion of visual history, this book examines eighteenth-century engraved book illustrations in order to outline the genealogy of the modern visualisation of the past in Britain. This study is based on a body of more than a hundred engraved historical plates designed in ...
The Victorian Painting of Modern Life
1st Edition
By Pamela Fletcher
December 30, 2024
This text offers a comprehensive and tightly focused account of the emergence and flourishing of British modern-life paintings at midcentury. Contemporary subjects were new and risky in the late 1840s and early 1850s; immensely popular and much debated by 1858; and already falling out of fashion ...
Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage and the Art Market
1st Edition
Edited
By Julie F. Codell
October 14, 2024
This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the production of Victorian art autograph replicas, a painting’s subsequent versions created by the same artist who painted the first version. Autograph replicas were considered originals, not copies, and were highly valued by collectors in Britain, ...
Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago: Imagining Islands
1st Edition
Edited
By Ysanne Holt, David Martin-Jones, Owain Jones
October 14, 2024
This edited collection, including contributors from the disciplines of art history, film studies, cultural geography and cultural anthropology, explores ways in which islands in the north of England and Scotland have provided space for a variety of visual-cultural practices and forms of creative ...
Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction
1st Edition
By Kate Holterhoff
October 08, 2024
This book examines illustrations created to accompany fictions written by several of the most popular authors published in Britain and America between 1885 and 1920. By studying the lavish illustrations that complemented not only initial serializations, but also subsequent publications of fictions...
British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution
1st Edition
Edited
By Charlotte Gould, Sophie Mesplède
May 31, 2023
This book explores the nature of Britain-based artists’ engagement with the transformations of their environment since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. At a time of pressing ecological concerns, the international group of contributors provide a series of case studies that ...
Artangel and Financing British Art: Adapting to Social and Economic Change
1st Edition
By Charlotte Gould
January 21, 2023
The Artangel Trust has been credited with providing artists with all the money and logistics they need to create one-off dream projects. An independent art commissioning agency based in London, it has operated since 1985 and is responsible for producing some of the most striking ephemeral and ...
British Art for Australia, 1860-1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries
1st Edition
By Matthew C. Potter
January 21, 2023
Traditional postcolonial scholarship on art and imperialism emphasises tensions between colonising cores and subjugated peripheries. The ties between London and British white settler colonies have been comparatively neglected. Artworks not only reveal the controlling intentions of imperialist ...
Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain
1st Edition
By Lucy D. Curzon
September 30, 2021
Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain critically analyses the role that visual culture played in the early development of Mass-Observation, the innovative British anthropological research group founded in 1937. The group’s production and use of painting, collage, ...
The British School of Sculpture, c.1760-1832
1st Edition
Edited
By Jason Edwards, Sarah Burnage
March 31, 2021
The British School of Sculpture, c. 1760–1832 represents the first edited collection exploring one of the most significant moments in British art history, returning to centre stage a wide range of sculpture considered for the first time by some of the most important scholars in the field. Following...