Introduction: An Invitation

Abstract

This book investigates how art writing in the long Edwardian period, c.1895–1914, functioned as an active agent in the construction of embodied , performative viewing experiences. Any attempt to trace how spectators encountered and responded to art needs to account for the ways in which this occurred beyond a physical confrontation between a spectator and an art work. Utilizing joint phenomenological-semiotic perspective, this book outlines a methodology for analysing the rhetorical loci of aesthetic encounter, and focuses on how art writing intervenes in the viewer-object exchange, sha** and conditioning the attitudes and behaviors of spectators. It argues for the need to attend to the diversity of such art writing, with a range of works providing the source material for this investigation, often texts that are otherwise absent from art-historical study. The methodology herein has implications for how we understand the conditioned or constructed nature of aesthetic experience more broadly, allowing us to identify its performative qualities: its basis in bodily response; its contingency on social context; and the importance of space and environment in sha** experience.