Re-viewing history: antiquaries, the graphic arts and Scotland's lost geographies, c.1660-1820

This thesis examines topographical art depicting Scotland’s natural scenery and built environments, architecture, antiquities and signs of modern improvement, made during the period 1660 to 1820. It sets out to demonstrate that topography and topographical art was not exclusively antiquarian in nature, but ranged across various fields of learning and practice. It included the work of artists, geographers, cartographers, travel writers, poets, landscape gardeners, military surveyors, naturalists and historians who were concerned with representing the country’s varied, and often contentious, histories within an increasingly modernising present. The visual images that are considered here were forms of knowledge that found expression in drawings, paintings and engravings, elevations, views and plans. They were made on military surveys and picturesque tours, and were often intended to be included alongside written texts, both published and unpublished, frequently connecting with travels, tours, memoirs, essays and correspondence. It will also be argued that topography was a social practice, involving networks of artists, collectors, publishers and writers, who exchanged information in drawings and letters in a nationwide, and often increasingly commercial enterprise. This thesis will explore some of the strands of such a vast network of picture-making that existed in Scotland, and Britain, between 1660 and 1820, as visual images were circulated, copied, recycled and adapted, and topographical and antiquarian visual culture emerges as a complex, synoptic form of inquiry.

Photography and sociology: an exercise in serendipity

This thesis examines the relationship between photography and sociology as offering complementary ways of understanding ourselves and the world we live in. Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams, I examine the idea of a ‘field’ of photography within the field of cultural production more generally. The practises of documentary photography, photojournalism and fine art photography are explored with specific reference to images of war. In this arena, the politics, aesthetics and ethics of representing the body in pain are addressed.

Every nation under heaven: the importance of the biblical concept of nations for contemporary mission practice

Is there a concept of nationhood in the Bible that can provide us with a framework for cross-cultural Christian mission? This thesis argues that current evangelical missiology has accepted too willingly the categories of the secular Enlightenment understanding of ethnicity and nationhood, and that it needs to rethink its understanding of nations from a biblical standpoint. While the pressures of globalisation are seen by some as rapidly eclipsing the nation-state, this thesis will argue that we need to move beyond the narrower secular categories of citizenship, political power and the boundaries of the state to recover a more biblical understanding of nationhood. By reference to Genesis 10-11, Acts 2:1-11 and those passages in the Book of Revelation that discuss the destiny of the nations, it will show that the biblical understanding of nations includes deeper ideas of shared history, culture and language as the essential components of nationhood. It will explain how nations are part of the created order, and explore the impact of the Babel narrative on our understanding of nations in relation to God. It will demonstrate that Pentecost did not reverse the curse of Babel, but served rather to honour the dignity and value of nations and their languages. It will also argue that nations have a destiny in the New Creation according to the Book of Revelation. This biblical concept of nationhood has significant implications in several areas: the development of a public theology; a Christian response to nationalism; the question of how urban mission fits within mission to the nations; and the importance of indigenous languages in cross-cultural mission, especially in the multicultural cities of Europe.

Art, sex, and institutions: defining, collecting, and displaying Shunga

In Edo-Japan (c.1603 – 1868) shunga, sexually explicit prints, paintings and illustrated books, were widely produced and disseminated. However, from the 1850s onwards, shunga was suppressed by the government and it has largely been omitted from art history, excluded from exhibitions and censored in publications. Although changes have taken place, cultural institutions continue to be cautious about what they collect and exhibit, with shunga largely remaining a prohibited subject in Japan. Since the 1970s there has been a gradual increase in the acceptance of shunga outside Japan, as evidenced in the growing number of exhibitions and publications. The initial impetus behind this thesis was: Why and how did shunga become increasingly acceptable in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, whilst conversely becoming unacceptable in post-Edo Japan? I discuss how and why attitudes to shunga in the UK and Japan have changed from the Edo period to the present day, and consider how definitions can affect this. My research examines how shunga has been dealt with in relation to private and institutional collecting and exhibitions. In order to gauge modern responses, the 2013 Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition at the British Museum is used as an in-depth study – utilising mixed methods and an interdisciplinary approach to analyse curatorial and legal decisions, as well as visitor feedback. To-date there are no official or standardised guidelines for the acquisition, cataloguing, or display of sexually explicit artefacts. It is intended that institutions will benefit from my analysis of the changing perceptions of shunga and of previous shunga collections and exhibitions when dealing with shunga or other sexually explicit items in the future.