MLA VIDES 2013
Welcome to the first edition of VIDES, the online journal produced by the students of the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford, as part of their Master’s degree in Literature and Arts. As the name of the degree suggests, the course covers many different academic fields alongside literature: philosophy, history, material culture, history of art, theology and architecture. The journal features essays that combine these disciplines, enlightening understanding in one field through study of another. This edition brings together essays that explore connections between two artefacts, which for the purposes of this collection can include texts, objects, buildings and images. The authors integrate detailed research with new interpretations, addressing contemporary debates that spill over the confines of a particular period or specialism.
Date created:
Resources for this course
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Names are Everything: For Oscar Wilde, Posing as a Letter and Visiting Card, Elaine Hernen |
This paper considers two artefacts created by Oscar Wilde: The manuscript of ‘Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’, and an example of a visiting card... |
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The Banqueting House and The Masque of Augurs: Architecture and Metatheatricality in a Jacobean Masque, Jeremy Newton |
The Banqueting House in Whitehall was designed by Inigo Jones and built between 1619 and 1622. Its functions included the staging of masques, and... |
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A Chapel, a Novel, and the Word of God. Virginia Brookes |
This essay attempts to portray two artefacts, the Wesley Memorial Methodist Church in Oxford, and the novel Adam Bede by George Eliot. These two... |
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‘Venus and Adonis’ reworked: transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in William Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ and J. M. W. Turner’s ‘Adonis Departing for the Chase’. Laura Bouttell |
Transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is paradoxical, a process of change that fixes in time a specific narrative moment. This work considers two... |
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A comparative study of Lady Hertford’s grotto at Marlborough and William Kent’s illustration of Spring in James Thomson's The Seasons. Richard D A Lamont |
‘Poetry, Painting and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three Graces who dress... |
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The Continence of Scipio and Katherine Manners, Anna M. Trotter |
This work considers and connects the Jacobean-Caroline Era painting The Continence of Scipio, c.1620/1, Christ Church Gallery, Oxford, and the... |
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From ‘the Word’ to ‘the Eucharist’ in fifty years - reflected in sketch and photograph. Oxford Movement inspired liturgical change in the church of St. Margaret, Dunham Massey, Cheshire. Christine Mona Armstrong |
In this essay, by comparing an 1856 London Illustrated News sketch of the interior of St. Margaret’s Church, Dunham Massey, Cheshire with a... |
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Designs for the Altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral: The Comparative Visions of Sir Christopher Wren and Thomas Garner, Shanna M. Patton |
Thomas Garner’s 1888 design for the altar and reredos at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral is typically remembered as controversial and inconsistent... |
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Strange Bed-fellows: A Bishop’s Crozier and a Stained Glass Window, Elan Preston-Whyte |
The crozier of William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, provides a fine example of the Gothic art and craft of the fourteenth century displaying... |
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An Arts and Crafts vision: A Pot and a Lecture, Penelope Fraser |
This garden pot was made around 1898 at the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild (PAG) in Surrey, established by Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938). The lecture... |
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Seeking Authenticity: Late Victorian Aesthetic Researches in John Ruskin’s approach of the St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice and William Lethaby’s Design for the Eagle Building in Birmingham (1851-1901), David Lamoureux |
The two artefacts described and contrasted here are John Ruskin’s 1851 description of the St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice and the facade of William... |
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Sexual Politics, Pomegranates and Production: William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere and La Belle Iseult in Dialogue, Anna Marie Attwell |
Examining patterns in William Morris’s poetry and book art, Isolde Karen Herbert observes that ‘Morris’s perception is aesthetically and... |
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Manly men and angelic women: Gender and nostalgia in George Elgar Hicks’s watercolour The Sinews of Old England (1857) and in an advertisement for Cadbury's Cocoa (1886). Karen Walker |
The Sinews of Old England depicts an idealised labourer and his family at the door of their cottage. Cadbury's Cocoa used a similar image for an... |
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When costume became fashion in Victorian dress: An exploration of historicity, exoticism and convention in E.W. Godwin’s ‘A Lecture on Dress’ and Lady Clementina Hawarden’s ‘Study from Life’, Kenya Hunt |
Many modern day ideas about women’s dress in fact have their origins in concepts that began in the Victorian era: beauty and utility, historicity... |
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Josephine Butler (1828 – 1906) as depicted by Alexander Munro in sculpture (1855) and obituary (1907). Philippa Toogood |
The purpose of this essay is to explore the extent to which Alexander Munro’s 1855 sculpture of Josephine Butler and her obituary, published in... |
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Ludicrous or lucid? Medieval costumes and royal politics in mid-nineteenth century Britain, Ian Hunter |
This paper explores the motivation and impact of the use of medieval imagery on the notion of nineteenth century queenship by examination of Sir... |
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‘It is the past alone that can explain the present’: a comparison between a passage in Disraeli’s Sybil and a membership card of the National Chartist Association, Darren Ormandy |
Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or, The Two Nations was published in 1845. It is both a story of romantic adventure and a manifesto for the... |
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The English electoral hustings as depicted by William Hogarth and Anthony Trollope, David Potter |
This essay discusses aspects of ‘Old Corruption’ in the English electoral process of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through a comparison... |
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Labour Theories and Paper Currencies: The Economic Concerns of William Cobbett’s ‘Address to the Journeymen and Labourers,’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Men of England &c- A song’, Paul Stephens |
Cobbett’s reformist pamphlet ‘Address to the Journeymen and Labourers’ (1816) attempts to demystify the political and economic causes of the... |
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Nostalgic Teleology: Arnoldian Culture & Yeats’ Byzantium, Peter Tuite |
Following publication of Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), W.B. Yeats responded to Arnold’s ideas in his essay Celtic... |
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Face(t)s of British Wagnerism: Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing The Wagnerites (1894) and George Bernard Shaw’s essay The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), Siri Kohl |
In the 1890s British Wagnerism was at its height. The works of Richard Wagner were admired and condemned equally for their daring musical... |
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An Opium Pipe in a Collection and in Journalism, Joe Dunnage |
An Opium Pipe in a Collection and in Journalism: A comparison between a Chando Pipe from the Bragge Collection at the British Museum and ‘East... |
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From Grave Goods to Democratic Ownership, an Engraving of the Trebbia Tomb and the Hamilton Vase, Geoffrey Stone |
This paper provides a case study of two objects, an ancient vase and an engraving illustrating the opening of an Etruscan tomb dating to the third... |
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Nova Albion Revealed: Drake’s claim of California celebrated by Hakluyt and Hondius, Martha Doerr Toppin |
In this essay I will examine two accounts of Sir Francis Drake’s acquisition of Nova Albion for England. I will compare and contrast a text, ‘The... |
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Introduction to MLA Vides |
An introduction to MLA Vides |
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Vides Contents Page |
Contents page for the 2013 MLA Vides publication. |
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