Vision and the Visual Arts in Galdos: A Study of the Novels and Newspaper Articles (Liverpool Monographs in Hispanic Studies, 6) - Hardcover

Bly, Peter A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0905205308 ISBN 13: 9780905205304

Publisher: Francis Cairns (Publications) Ltd, 1986

Synopsis

Throughout his life the major Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdós (1843-1920) took a keen interest in the visual arts. Parts I and II of this book discuss Galdós's art journalism and his artistic contributions to the illustrated edition of the historical novels. But the main focus (part III) is on references to the visual arts and pictorial landscapes, particularly in the serie contemporánea, the contemporary social novels. Such allusions often act as a guide to interpretation; they also relate to the whole philosophical question of how the eye perceives physical reality. Professor Bly offers a fascinating analysis of the various types of interrelationship between visual art and novelistic action; his study contributes greatly to the understanding of aesthetic and moral perception in Galdós's novels, and contains wider implications for nineteenth-century literary and aesthetic theory.

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Review

... for the modern college teacher an indispensable commentary on twenty-five major Galds novels -- Hispania 71 (1988)

Bly's exposition is clear, his approach - covering both art and novel - comprehensive, the categories he proposes illuminating. ... Bly's study will be read with benefit by all galdosistas. -- Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 65 (1988) 413

Notwithstanding debatable and intentionalist conclusions ... this book is indispensable reading for any scholar of Galds -- Romance Quarterly 35 (1988) 375-8

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

(From Introduction, p.5) In the last analysis, though, one might wonder whether the inclusion of visual art terms, however brief or extended, intended or hackneyed, is absolutely necessary for the establishment of correspondences between the arts. Surely any verbal transcription of a scene, panorama or character appearance demands that the writer's retina and then his mind's eye first immobilize their features as if they were components in a painting or any type of art surface. In turn, the reader will reproduce the process, but in reverse: as the eye scans the words on the printed page, the mind's eye will re-create the stasis of the original tableau. Clearly, though, to examine all instances of this basic pictorial description in Galds' fiction would be a Herculean task. For the purpose of this study, I have limited discussion to those textual passages in which the vocabulary of the visual arts, however stereotyped, appears. In this regard, it is further desirable to widen our terms of reference; the visual arts are so often confined to the higher forms of painting, sculpture and architecture that such popular, low-brow forms as silhouettes, figurines, photographs, mural graffiti, panoramas and magic lanterns (to cite only a few examples) tend to be unjustly ignored.

Nevertheless, interart parallels in novels can only constitute one dimension of a complex pattern of heterogeneous materials. If they are not to intrude embarrassingly in the development of the fiction as pleasant but irrelevant displays of erudition, then they must be integrated into the theme of the novels and serve as significant guides for the reader.

Edition details

• Publisher: Francis Cairns (Publications) Ltd
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0905205308
• ISBN 13: 9780905205304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 242