Portraits In Fiction - Rilegato

Byatt, A.S.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0701173106 ISBN 13: 9780701173104

Casa editrice: Chatto & Windus, 2001

Riassunto

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. In this intriguing, provocative little book, A.S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjuring up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways, to the art of Cezanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage. In her own novels, A.S. Byatt has often evoked the power of portraits. Calling on a host of illustrations, she invites us to share, and enjoy, the writer's peoccupation with the painted image. A feast for the eye and for the imagination, Portraits in Fiction is a remarkable and immensely enjoyable exploration of the marriage of two great genres.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

“She is, as ever, witty and acute in describing imagined paintings, and relating them to real painters and noting the impossible gulf between a portrait in dried oil pigment and one in words... Byatt is always worth reading... beautifully illustrated.” -- Daily Telegraph
From the Trade Paperback edition.

L'autore:

A.S. Byatt is acclaimed internationally for her fiction and also for her criticism in the fields of both literature and art. Her novels include Possession, the sequence A Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower, and The Biographer’s Tale while her most recent collections of short stories are The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Elementals. Selections of her essays have been published in Passions of the Mind and Histories and Stories.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Chatto & Windus
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0701173106
• ISBN 13: 9780701173104
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 101