Subject: Visible and invisible -- Apples and oranges -- Desire and loss -- The theater as a visual arrt -- Afterword

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures. In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

Words Into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders is a collection of ten new essays on the American poet and artist E. E. Cummings (1894-1962). Bringing together the verbal and the visual, two forms of art traditionally considered to be distinct and separate, the volume invites the reader to examine fields in Cummings studies that have been neglected or under-researched. An artist who vigorously pursued painting and writing throughout his life, Cummings may be called the William Blake of American Modernism, a PoetAndPainter whose habitual genre-crossing renders his oeuvre a unique choice for multidisciplinary critical studies. The essays of this volume address the limits of the visual, linguistic, spatial, and political vison of the artist. Contributors to this volume include established as well as junior Cummings scholars from the U.S. and Europe, giving Words Into Pictures an international and authoritative flavour.

This book explores some of the ways in which word and image worked together in the nineteenth century, in terms of pictures, poetry and fiction. The authors keep in mind how word and image negotiate and compete for each other’s spaces. They seek to interrogate how image arises from absences in texts, and how image gives rise to narrative or voice. Topics include ekphrasis, illustration, literary representations of artists, the visual in writing, the staging of images and the textualization of theatrical tableaux, and related cultural and ideological tropes. This is covered in three main areas: ideological and philosophical resonances of image and text in fiction; the peculiar fusion of text and image that was the bread and butter of the Pre-Raphaelites; and book illustration, especially the tensions between writer and artist as authors of the text. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of Victorian literary and art history studies.

At the same time her stance as a feminist led her not only to articulate issues in terms of gender but also to define her poetry in opposition to the dominant literary form of the age, satire."--BOOK JACKET.

What did it mean to be a spectator during the lifetime of Shakespeare or of Aphra Behn? In Early Modern Spectatorship contributors use the idea of spectatorship to reinterpret canonical early modern texts and bring visibility to relatively unknown works. While many early modern spectacles were designed to influence those who watched, the very presence of spectators and their behaviour could alter the conduct and the meaning of the event itself. In the case of public executions, for example, audiences could both observe and be observed by the executioner and the condemned. Drawing on work in the digital humanities and theories of cultural spectacle, these essays discuss subjects as various as the death of Desdemona in Othello, John Donne's religious orientation, Ned Ward's descriptions of London, and Louis Laguerre's murals painted for the residences of English aristocrats. A lucid exploration of subtle questions, Early Modern Spectatorship identifies, imagines, and describes the spectator's experience in early modern culture.

During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Burne-Jones and Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. In Reframing Decadence, Peter Jeffreys returns us to this critical period of Cavafy’s life, showing the poet’s creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. In the process, Jeffreys offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy’s relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence. Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy’s view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater’s imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. Jeffreys concludes by considering Cavafy’s current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.