Table of Contents

Preface: What Goes Without Saying
Introduction: Feeling for Things, or What Really Matters
Part I. INTERESTING
1: Transfiguration
2: Desire and the Body of Inspiration
3:

About the Author

Jonah Siegel is Distinguished Professor of English and Co-Director of the British Studies Center at Rutgers University. He has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, as well as a recipient of a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Aside from numerous articles on literature and the fine arts, he is the author of two books, Desire & Excess: The
Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (2000; Rudikoff Prize winner, 2000), and Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (2005), and the editor of The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of
Nineteenth-Century Sources (2007).

Reviews

The conversational style of Siegel teasingly, gently, takes us into complicated matters with ease and elegance, winding us along a path similar to the Hogarthian line of beauty and grace. There is plenty of both art and matter in the book, as also testified by the copious endnotes. Full of useful references for the reader whowishes to pursue Siegel's many trails, they provide stimulating guidance for further reading as a reflection of his own train of thought.
*Lene Østermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism*

A new book by Jonah Siegel is always of real interest.
*Jeremy Melius, Critical Inquiry*

... an often fascinating and insightful tour with many more stops along the way.
*Elizabeth Helsinger, University of Chicago, Review 19*

Material Inspirations is an admirable, learned study, and a major achievement in assessing the force and scope of nineteenth-century art history.
*Francis O'Gorman, Review of English Studies*

Material Inspirations is an erudite and impressively wide-ranging book that speaks particularly subtly about instances of failure and crises caused by the ongoing struggle to make sense of art as a material phenomenon.
*Stefano Evangelista, Victorian Studies*