Full Name: Paulson, Ronald
Gender: male
Date Born: 1930
Place Born: Bottineau, ND, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): literary history, literary studies, and visual culture
Career(s): educators and literary historians
Overview
Hogarth scholar and literary historian; Professor of English, Yale University and Johns Hopkins University. Paulson graduated from Yale University in 1952. After serving two years in the United States Army (artillery), 1952-54, he returned to Yale to complete his Ph.D. in 1958, writing his dissertation on Jonathan Swift. He taught as an instructor at the University of Illinois 1958-59, advancing to Assistant Professor, 1959-62 and Associate Professor, 1962-63. In 1963 he moved to Houston where he was named professor at Rice University. Paulson authored the catalog raisonné of William Hogarth’s prints in 1965, a revised edition appearing five years later. In 1967 was appointed professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, chairing the English Department, 1968-75 and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, 1973-75. His life of Hogarth appeared in 1971. In 1975 he became Professor at Yale University, named Thomas E. Donnelley Professor, 1980-84. and on the advisory committee of the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London, 1975-84. In 1984 he returned to The Johns Hopkins University, again chairing the English Department until 1991. He was appointed Mayer Professor of the Humanities in 1985. Emblem and Expression uses the differentiation between visual and verbal structures to demonstrate how meaning is created through pictures. It is, in Michael Kitson‘s words, “the first attempt to write a history of the visual arts in eighteenth-century Britain in terms of idealogical attitudes, manifested in the changing assumptions as to the kinds of things that art could do and what art was for.” Paulson’s 1971 biography of Hogarth was essentially devoid of the politics so crucial to his art production. Later, in his Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England and his multi-volume Hogarth biography, he reasserted Hogarth as a political person.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] The Business of Flesh and Blood: Theme and Structure in Swift’s “Tale of a Tub.” Yale University, 1958; Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975; Hogarth’s Graphic Works. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965, 2nd ed., 1970; Hogarth. 3 vols. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991ff.; Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. 2 vols. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London/Yale University Press, 1971; Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; Literary Landscape, Turner and Constable. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982; Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979; Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; Rowlandson: a New Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Sources
Ronald Paulson CV, http://www.jhu.edu/arthist/rpaulson; Kitson, Michael. “Introduction to the Fifth Edition.” Waterhouse, Ellis K. Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790. 5th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, pp. xv-xvi;