Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art - Hardcover

Fowler, Alastair

9780199259588: Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199259585 ISBN 13: 9780199259588

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2003

This book questions the assumption of a single realism, the continuous realism of novels. Many suppose that narrative before the novel either looked forward to it or was medieval and allegorical, and compare the introduction of single-point perspective with the rise of the novel. But continuous realism did not arise as soon as perspective was discovered. In actuality, a distinctive sort of Renaissance realism, with its own conventions, was practised from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Renaissance Realism surveys the history of perspective, showing that it only gradually came to dominate the western imagination and to become the default assumption for portrayal in the visual arts. Looked at in this way, correlates between literature and art emerge in the depiction of objects and events. Treatment of spatial arrangement and time sequences, for example, closely parallel 'simultaneous narration' in the visual arts.

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Review:

... a thought-provoking, richly illustrated and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in multidisciplinary studies that combine art and literature. The helpful comparison with Oriental art acts as a salutary reminder that our way of imagining the world is not the only one. (Cahiers �lisab�thains)

... this account of Renaissance narrative possibilities offers at the very least finely-developed evidence for the case which Fowler would make for plurality and discontinuity. (Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies)

... helpfully detailed references and a comprehensive bibliography. (Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies)

... so much to praise and to enjoy. (Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies)

Obviously a very great deal of the content of this audacious study is to a degree speculative, but it is never rash and is always grounded in an enviable knowledge of the period, of its discontinuities and difficulties as well as its coherences. (Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies)

... the argument advanced is audacious, carefully contexted and very well illustrated from a most impressive range of contemporary sources. (Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies)

... wide-ranging and engaging ... all managed with Fowler's accustomed and unruffled courtesy. (Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies)

Fowler's Renaissance Realism certainly deserves the highest commendation for asking large and recently neglected questions about the nature of mimesis before modernity, and it affords a wealth of persuasive evidence for the contention that viewing habits chaged only gradually over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Times Literary Supplement)

...a major work, stunningly learned in art history, wonderfully subtle in literary analysis, and truly communal, drawing on a rich array of recent secondary work. (The Review of English Studies)

About the Author:

Professor Alastair Fowler is Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh.

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