William Hogarth (1697-1764) is famous for his satiric representations of high and low life in the 18th century London. In his works, he took as one of his central artistic themes the staging of otherness and difference. In a revolutionary book, a group of international art historians and cultural theorists explore this major yet overlooked dimension of Hogarth's art and aesthetics. They show that, whether Hogarth illustrates a harlot or a wealthy patroness, a gouty earl or a dissolute rake, a black servant or an effeminate parasite, affairs regarding class, gender, and race reverberate throughout his paintings and prints and profoundly inform his unique innovation, the Modern Moral Subject.
Drawing on a broad selection of methodologies, the authors of the fifteen essays collected in this volume include the latest insights of cultural history, gender studies, and visual theory to look from a new perspective at a constellation of themes and issues recurring in Hogarth's work: the construction of truly diverse social, sexual, and racial identities; the role of women in the family and the public sphere; the critique of a culture of increasing commodification and imperial expansion; issues of politics and patronage; the body as both bearer of aesthetic as well as erotic desire. This volume also features the autobiographical testimony of a contemporary feminist black artist who took Hogarth's work as an inspiration.
By looking at this new dimension of Hogarth's work, The Other Hogarth both presents a revisionist perspective on the artist and invites us to read in his images the larger operations of eighteenth-century visual culture.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are David Bindman, Patricia Crown, Mark Hallett, Christina Kiaer, Sarah Maza, Richard Meyer, Frédéric Ogée, Lubaina Himid, Amelia Rauser, Sean Shesgreen, Nadia Tscherny, James Grantham Turner, David Solkin and Peter Wagner.