“Karen Georgi’s Critical Shift argues that the Civil War was less a disruptive dividing line between radically different artistic eras than a blip on an aesthetic continuum from the antebellum decades to the Gilded Age. To make the case, Georgi closely examines the influential writings of prominent art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William James Stillman and finds that the war had little or no impact on their ideas about what art should be and what role it should play in society. With its bold new challenge to the model of periodization that has shaped the history, and historiography, of nineteenth-century American art in the modern era, Critical Shift is a provocative contribution to the history of American art theory and criticism in the nineteenth century.” —Sarah Lea Burns, Indiana University “This study by Georgi, which draws together the ideas of three 19th-century art critics and commentators, offers a fascinating perspective that unexpectedly relates earlier concerns with those of a postmodern generation.” —S. Webster Choice “One cannot embark upon an analysis of how historical periodization took shape without being keenly aware of one’s own historical desires and their enactment in writing; these thoughtful concerns inform Georgi’s philosophy of history and undergird her historiographic enterprise. . . . Given the need for thorough, subtle, and complex analyses of historical art criticism in America, this investigation offers the tantalizing glimpse of what such projects might look like, if done with great restraint and attention to the intertwining of rhetoric and belief. The care with which she sets forth the boundaries of her study demonstrates how sensitive Georgi is to the failures any such ‘comprehensive’ study might risk in creating its own mythologized history.” —Emily Gephart Journal of Art Historiography