Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy; The Shelleys and the Brownings: Textual Reimaginings and the Question of Influence

Solkin observes in the closing paragraph of the essay that there is “a misogynistic politics” to repeatedly picturing women’s behinds (122). How do these illustrations, taken as a group, function in our present moment, riven as it is by public debates about gender identity and legislation that contests bodily autonomy on that basis? Art historical scholarship more broadly confronts a related question: what do we do with formally impressive artworks by important artists that graphically objectify women and diagram episodes of sexual violence? The catalogue does not put forward an answer to this, although it acknowledges the question and encourages us to recognize the “considerable historic and aesthetic interest” of such works (136). For some readers, Fuseli’s disregard for artistic norms and his exploration of taboo sexual practices will reveal his prescient genius, his foreshadowing of the transgressive energy of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes. For other readers, it will be difficult to accept that the artistic merit of this group of works can or should be disaggregated from their misogynistic and sexually violent content. In this sense, too, Fuseli remains a consummately contemporary figure: his works continue to exert pressure on the widening fault lines of a society that is perhaps no more stable today than it was in the years during and after the French Revolution.