Pictures of Romance : Form Against Context in Painting and Literature

Steiner, Wendy

ISBN 10: 0226772292 / ISBN 13: 9780226772295

Published by University of Chicago Press, 1987

Former library copy. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # GRP91409141

Synopsis:

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.

From the Back Cover: Using current narrative theory, Steiner identifies the factors that prompt us to read a picture as a story: multiple episodes, the repetition of a subject across those episodes, the evocation of realist conventions. Steiner then takes up this history at the point where the Renaissance system was breaking down.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Pictures of Romance : Form Against Context ...
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 1987
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good