'Venus surrounded by mirrors, reflecting her in different views': desire, uncertainty, and the viewer-reader in D. G. Rossetti's double-works

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D. G. Rossetti (1828-82) was one of the most important and original artistic forces of the 19th century (Ruskin, Pater): his work dominated the cultural geography of England from 1850 to 1910 (McGann) and remains uniquely compelling (Prettejohn). He was the principal figure of the Pre-Raphaelites-an avowedly cross-disciplinary avant-garde group of artists and writers. Studies on them, however, have not been marked by a comparably interdisciplinary methodology: art-historical and literary scholarship has remained consistently segregated.Despite Rossetti's painter-poet status, at the centre of his oeuvre is a core of thirty art-literature double-works that remain understudied due to their form (the inherent interdisciplinarity presents a significant structural challenge to divided art-historical and literary scholarship) and content (the formulation of desire is complex, unstable, and indeterminate - especially when approached from a single disciplinary perspective). While the Rossetti Archive - the hypermedia collection of his complete works that facilities structured search and analysis - collates the thirty double-works and provides brief (individual) commentaries, no research on the complex interplay between form, content, and the viewer-reader exists. This is despite recent work reuniting Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry (Prettejohn, Helsinger, Andres and Donnelly). Deploying interwoven art-historical (theoretical, iconographic, formalist, and materialist), literary (textual, semiotic, and archival), and philosophical (ontological and epistemological) methodologies, this PhD will deliver original scholarship analogous to the double-works' interdisciplinarity. Given the intense dialectic between form and content - and with the particular images of desire sustained and developed by a double-work only partially accessible via each 'half' - it is only by bridging image and text that we can recover Rossetti's sophisticated and unexplored psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic engagement and ideas.Through 'reconstruction' - by engaging with the picture-poem double-works in the form they were originally conceived and presented - the visual-verbal exchange between image and text can be fully recovered. Influenced by recent psychosexual studies of Rossetti's work (Bullen, Waldman), this PhD will demonstrate that Rossetti's formulation of the relationship between desire and uncertainty is one that anticipates theories of the internally-divided subject developed since Freud. Correcting the overfocus on simply tracing psychological and aesthetic concepts across disciplines, this research will historicise the desire-uncertainty and image-text interplay, situating Rossetti in the emerging field of Victorian psychological aesthetics (Morgan, Tate). Uniquely, it will also concern itself with the idea of the viewer-reader and experience of concurrent viewing-reading. By repositioning the absence of stability and reconciliation (in the form of uncertain and unfulfilled desire) as key to interpreting the double-works, this research develops the concept of 'readerly freedom' and, in turn, proposes an - as yet unestablished - analogue concept of 'viewerly freedom' and thus has major implications for art-historical scholarship. Enabling direct assessment, almost all the double-works are in public collections in the UK (Tate) and US (Delaware, Fogg): the digital Rossetti Archive also provides multiple (sometimes radically different) versions of the double-works' components, aiding initial revisional research. Given the need to assess them alongside the intricate network of textual relationships within which they sit, archival fieldwork (animated by questions of how the double-work and viewer-reader concepts have been understood and debated) will also be necessary at the British Library, Ashmolean, Princeton, Yale, and - utilising their significant manuscript material - Delaware's Bancroft Collection.