Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion presents new research into Pre-Raphaelites in Northern England to accompany an exhibition of artworks of the same title at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery from February 2016.

Featuring more than 100 works of art from celebrated Pre-Raphaelite artists, this fascinating new research into Pre-Raphaelite painters and collectors positions Liverpool as the Victorian art capital of the north.

Beauty is both a history of art, and a history of aesthetics. Eco draws on the histories of both art and aesthetics to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times. Taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have sought to define it. Eco writes about Botticelli and Michelangelo, but also about the way fashion of the 1960s owes much to ancient Egyptian dress, or the fact that ancient Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. Bespreking van de Nederlandse vertaling in: Boekman. 17(2005)65(winter. 106-107).

Explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture; illustrated with abundant examples of painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. Demonstrates how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal.

"Never before published, White Rose and the Red is the fictional biography of Elizabeth Siddall, wife of English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This extraordinary novel explores the charged interpersonal relationships between and among Siddall, Rossetti, and other key members of the pre-Raphaelite movement, including William Morris and John Ruskin, in an effort to depict struggles of nineteenth-century women within the avant-garde sphere." "During H.D.'s lifetime, publishers shied away from the novel's radically unconventional hybrid form that combines elements of historical nonfiction, fiction, and biography. As part of the dense and allusive prose trilogy written during and after World War II (along with The Sword Went Out to Sea and The Mystery), White Rose and the Red exemplifies the mythic theme that H.D. saw as unifying all her writing. It also examines how Siddall - a controversial muse and model - became the iconic figure of an artistic movement." "In her clear, energetic, and critically informed introduction, Alison Halsall situates H.D.'s work within an analytical framework that examines factors of gender, class, and spiritualism, which shaped Siddall's posthumous reputation. Halsall enhances the edition by pointing out its relevance to important issues within H.D. scholarship and analyzes Victorian influences on modernist self-definition." --Book Jacket.