Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature - Rilegato

Steiner, Wendy

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0226772292 ISBN 13: 9780226772295

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 1987

Riassunto

How do pictures tell stories? Why does the literary romance so often refer to paintings and other visual art objects? Beginning with these two seemingly unrelated questions, Wendy Steiner reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and the literary romance.

Romances violate the casual, temporal, and logical cohesiveness of realist novels, and they do so in part by depicting love as a state of suspension, a condition outside of time. Steiner argues that because Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting also represents a suspended moment of perception with "unnatural" clarity and compression of meaning, it readily serves the romance as a symbol of antirealism. Yet the atemporality of stopped-action painting was actually an attempt to achieve pictorial realism—the way things "really" look. It is this paradox that interests Steiner: to signal their departure from realism, romances evoke the symbol of "realistic" visual artwork. Steiner explores this problem through analyses of Keats, Hawthorne, Joyce, and Picasso. She then examines a return to narrative conventions in visual art in the twentieth century, in the work of Lichtenstein and Warhol, and speculates on the fate of pictorial storytelling and the romance in postmodern art. An aesthetic fantasia of sorts, this study combines theory and analysis to illuminate an unexpected interconnection between literature and the visual arts.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0226772292
• ISBN 13: 9780226772295
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 225