Righting the Victorian Artists: The Redgraves' A Century of Painters of the English School and the Serialization of Art History
4. Bourdieu, Cultural Production, p. 77. The Victorian century experienced an explosion of biographies in multiple forms. Production of lifewriting genres continues to this day from celebrity biographies to the grand revision of the DNB. Perhaps no single area was more revised and shaped by biographies than art history biographies in magazines, publishers' series, collective biographical volumes, family biographies and biographical dictionaries. Victorian lifewritings shaped concepts of art, artists, genius, and aesthetic worth. Less obviously, they shaped notions about the intersection of individual artistic productivity with national interests and concepts of history. The Victorian literature of art produced 'art', defining its social, economic and political roles. Crucial to this shaping and its antecedent was the construction of the 'artist', a persona whose production, daily life, personality and role as bearer of national character became increasingly inseparable from the valuation of art works in particular and of cultural production in general. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, discourse about art constitutes art's cultural meanings; the 'work' is generated by