Portraits In Fiction - Softcover

Byatt, A S

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099429845 ISBN 13: 9780099429845

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

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. 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 conjure 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 Cézanne. 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.

About this title

Review:

‘She is, as ever, witty and acute... Byatt is always worth reading...beautifully illustrated’ -- Daily Telegraph

From the Publisher:

A lively, fascinating and sumptuously illustrated exploration of the links between fiction, writers of fiction and portraits by one of the most admired writers of modern fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0099429845
• ISBN 13: 9780099429845
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112