Hogarth's Harlot

by Paulson, Ronald

• ISBN13: 9780801873911
• ISBN10: 0801873916
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-29
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

In 1732, a blasphemous burlesque of the Christian Atonement was published in England without comment from the government or the Church of England. In Hogarth's Harlot, Ronald Paulson explains this absence of official censure through a detailed examination of the parameters of blasphemy in eighteenth-century England and the changing attitudes toward the central tenets of the Christian Church among artists in this period. Discerning a profound spiritual and cultural shift from atonement and personal salvation to redemption, incarnation, and acts of charity and love, Paulson focuses on such influential factors as English antipopery and anti-Jacobitism, as well as the ideas of the English Enlightenment. Offering imaginative and deeply informed readings of a wide range of artistic works -- engravings by Hogarth; poems by Milton, Pope, Christopher Smart, and Blake; plays by Nicholas Rowe and George Lillo; paintings and sculptures by Benjamin West, John Zoffany, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Louis-Francois Roubiliac; and oratorios by George Frederic Handel -- Paulson explores the significance of the medium in which artists produced "sacred parody" and how these works both reflected and influenced attitudes toward the nature of Christianity in England. As England's faithful began to worry less about everlasting felicity in heaven and more about life on earth, these diverse artists provided them with new ways of thinking about both their spiritual and their social existence.

Author Biography

Ronald Paulson is William D. and Robin Mayer Professor of the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His many books include Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Preface	xv
Introduction: The Sacrament of the Eucharist	1	(26)
Redemption/Atonement	1	(3)
Christological Typology	4	(1)
Incarnation	5	(5)
Reformation/Iconoclasm	10	(4)
Restoration	14	(3)
Paradise Lost	17	(2)
Travesty/Burlesque	19	(3)
Deism and Aesthetics	22	(2)
Spiritual Pilgrimage	24	(3)
Blasphemy and Belief: The Case of A Harlot's Progress	27	(61)
The Case	27	(20)
Blasphemy	47	(5)
Burlesque	52	(4)
The Joseph-Mary Joke	56	(1)
Protestant Antipopery	57	(3)
English Antipopish Art	60	(4)
Dissenter Anticlericalism/Old Whig Politics	64	(3)
Opposition Politics: Swift, Nicholas Amhurst, and Bishop Hoadly	67	(8)
Cunicularii: The Nativity Parodied	75	(1)
Deism: Thomas Woolston	76	(6)
Antisemitism	82	(6)
Atonement	88	(45)
The Problem of Vicarious Atonement	88	(2)
Milton's Critique	90	(2)
The Empiricist Critique	92	(4)
Substitution: The Harlot Died for Our Sins	96	(3)
The Blemished Lamb	99	(2)
The Object of Sexual Passion and Devotion	101	(3)
Mother and Son	104	(2)
The Replacement of God: Deism, Hoadly, and Antinomianism	106	(3)
Typology and Allegory: Mary and Hercules	109	(8)
Grace: Choice and Chance	117	(2)
The Harlot's Last Supper	119	(3)
Jane Shore and Sarah Millwood	122	(8)
Efficacious Atonement: West's Death of General Wolfe	130	(3)
Incarnation	133	(32)
Mary's Magnificat	133	(2)
Christ in Us: James Nayler	135	(7)
Incarnation in Art	142	(8)
Aesthetics: The ``Living Woman''	150	(3)
Libertinism: John Wilkes and the Black Mass	153	(5)
Wright of Derby and Gainsborough	158	(7)
Redemption	165	(36)
Milton's Poetic Redemption	165	(5)
Poetics versus Aesthetics: Pope's Belinda	170	(15)
Redemption and Restoration/Recovery: The Dunciad	185	(5)
Swift's Anti-aesthetics: The Harlot Celia	190	(3)
Blushes and Blemishes: Belinda and the Harlot	193	(3)
Mock Redeemers	196	(5)
Mediation	201	(51)
Redemption and Mediation	201	(13)
Handel's English Sacred Oratorio: The Mediation of Esther	214	(9)
Jephtha's Daughter: Human Sacrifice Mediated	223	(4)
``The Mediatorship of the Son of God'': Jonathan Richardson	227	(2)
The Mediation of the ``Living Woman''	229	(4)
Paul, Drusilla, and Felix	233	(4)
Good and Bad Mediators	237	(2)
The Connoisseurs' Telescope	239	(3)
Ganymede: Christ and Antinous	242	(3)
Zoffany: The Artist and the Connoisseur	245	(7)
Resurrection	252	(37)
Soteriology and Eschatology	252	(2)
Roubiliac's Funerary Sculptures	254	(20)
Hogarth's Resurrections	274	(1)
Demotic Imagery of Death and Resurrection	275	(8)
Apocalypse: The Conversion of the Jews	283	(6)
Smart: The Magnificat and Jubilate Agno	289	(37)
The Harlot's Cat	289	(4)
Smart's Magnifi-cat	293	(5)
Mary Midnight	298	(4)
David the Psalmist	302	(4)
Both Magnificat and Jubilate Agno	306	(2)
Between Resurrection and Redemption	308	(6)
Redemption of the Unclean	314	(4)
The Cornu-copia	318	(8)
Blake: The Harlot and the Lamb	326	(29)
``The Youthful Harlot's Curse''	326	(5)
Mary, Rahab, and Tirzah	331	(3)
The Human Form Divine	334	(7)
Blake and Milton	341	(3)
Blake and Hogarth	344	(11)
Notes	355	(52)
Index	407