Embodied Beauty: Making Intersectional Meanings in Imperial Aestheticism, 1857-1900

This doctoral thesis is an interdisciplinary project which develops late-Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism studies. The first chapter considers the interior designs of William Burges at Cardiff Castle, in which he used Gothic Revivalism, Islamic world designs, and Japanese source materials. The second chapter contributes significant finds to Valentine Prinsep’s durbar and Orientalist paintings of Egypt, the Near East, and India. Finally, the third chapter examines representations of Oscar Wilde alongside the lived experience of Black dandies during his 1882 lecture tour of the United States, and recreates the collections of global art objects and designs that he and his wife Constance had in their Tite Street home. These three, interdisciplinary case studies bridge and overlap late-Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism along the axis of British imperialism, interrogating an Imperial Aestheticism.