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Imagining the Fishing: Artists and Fishermen in Late Nineteenth Century Cornwall1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Bernard Deacon
Bernard Deacon
Affiliation:
Department of Lifelong Learning, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
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Abstract

The focus of postmodernist historians on language and representation clashes with the more traditional approach of the social historian to material structures and processes. This article adopts the suggestion of Wahrman that a ‘space of possibilities’ exists where these apparently competing perspectives might be connected. The concept of a ‘space of possibilities’ is pursued through a case study of a marginal group, the fishing communities of west Cornwall in the late nineteenth century. The article explores points of contact and contrast between the artistic and the fishing communities, between the painterly gaze and the subjects of that gaze. It is proposed that, while the artistic colonies and their representations might be explained as a result of discourses reproduced in the centre, their specific choice of location in Cornwall can also be related to the local economic and social history that granted them a space of possibilities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , October 2001 , pp. 159 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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