The Gothic Revival: (Art & Ideas)

At the height of the Victorian period, a passion for the Gothic style swept England and spread far beyond. Gothic architecture, associated with the social and cultural ideals of the Middle Ages, was seen as a means of remaking the modern world. In this lucid exposition, Chris Brooks unravels the layers of meaning that Gothic held for its many reinventors, from the political uses of Gothic history in the seventeenth century to Barry and Pugin's Houses of Parliament in the mid-nineteenth. Yet the Gothic revival is not just manifest in buildings continually recreated; it has taken the form of poetry and fiction, of painting and sculpture, of movies and video games, of Gothic music and Gothic punk. This is the first book to deal comprehensively with the whole scope of the Gothic Revival.

Table of Contents:
A style is born; the rhetoric of power - Gothic legacies c.1600-1700; making history - the 18th-century Gothic revival; house style - Strawberry Hill and domestic Gothic; storm and stress - romantic Gothic; looking back - defining a style; to the battlements - the advance of the sublime and the picturesque; domestic and national - secular Gothic in the early-19th century; the church's one foundation - the evolution of Victorian ecclesiastical Gothic; bearing the torch - the Gothic revival abroad; sermons in stones - readings in high Victorian Gothic; national monuments for a new age - the uses of Gothic in late 19th-century Europe and America; cathedrals and commerce - late Gothic revival c.1880-1900.

About the Author :
Chris Brooks lectures on Victorian culture at Exeter University's School of English. He is also Chairman of the Victorian Society, a Trustee of the Albert Memorial, and a member of English Heritage's Cathedrals and Churches Advisory Committee. He has written and edited several books, including Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World.

Review :

"Chris Brooks fulfills every expectation, indeed exceeds it. This breathtaking and stimulating survey offers, in one grand, sweeping narrative, an entirely new interpretation, at a stroke advancing a field which has been stagnant for too long."—Burlington Magazine

"This book is animated by so rich an appreciation of the difference between a stylistic fashion and a major cultural strain as to be something of a miracle. Chris Brooks' text is a skillful descriptive and analytical synthesis. It ranges convincingly between matters as far apart, chronologically and otherwise, as the rebuilding of Orleans Cathedral and the absurdities of Gothic Punk."—World of Interiors

"This is the most complete study available, and Brooks is a confident and reliable guide."—Independent

On the Art & Ideas series

"Art & Ideas has broken new ground in making accessible authoritative views on periods, movements and concepts in art. As a series it represents a real advance in publishing."—Sir Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate London

"The format is wonderful and offers what had long been missing in academic studies: usable manuals for specific themes or periods... I am definitely not alone in welcoming Art & Ideas as a precious set of teaching tools."—Joachim Pissarro, Yale University

"Phaidon's series may prove to be the pick of the crop. It boasts expert but undogmatic texts and a wealth of illustrations."—The Sunday Telegraph