The Other Hogarth

William Hogarth (1697-1764), famous for his satiric representations of high and low life in eighteenth-century London, took as one of his central artistic themes the staging of otherness and difference. In a groundbreaking book, a group of international art historians and cultural theorists investigates this major yet overlooked dimension of Hogarth's art and aesthetics. They show that, whether Hogarth depicts a harlot or a wealthy patroness, a gouty earl or a dissolute rake, a black servant or an effeminate parasite, issues of class, gender, and race reverberate throughout his paintings and prints and deeply inform his unique innovation, the Modern Moral Subject. Drawing on a broad array of methodologies, the authors of the fifteen essays gathered in this volume include the latest insights of cultural history, gender studies, and visual theory to look afresh at a constellation of themes and issues prominent in Hogarth's work: the construction of 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 a bearer of aesthetic as well as erotic desire. The volume also features the autobiographical testimony of a contemporary black feminist artist who took Hogarth's work as an inspiration. By looking at this unsuspected 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 broader operations of eighteenth-century visual culture. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are David Bindman, Patricia Crown, Mark Hallett, Lubaina Himid, Christina Kiaer, Sarah Maza, Richard Meyer, Freacute;deacute;ric Ogeacute;e, Amelia Rauser, Sean Shesgreen, David Solkin, Nadia Tscherny, James Grantham Turner, and Peter Wagner.