In this volume, specialists from different fields present case studies of text-image relationships in the religious field (1400-1700) with a methodological and/or theoretical dimension.
Although Edgar Allan Poe is most often identified with stories of horror and fear, there is an unrecognized and even forgotten side of the writer. He was a self-declared lover of beauty, who “From ...childhood's hour...had not seen / As others saw.” Poe and the Visual Arts is the first comprehensive study of how the author’s work relates to the visual culture of his time, reprising Poe’s “deep worship of all beauty,” which resounds in his earliest writing and never entirely fades, despite the demands of his commercial writing career. Barbara Cantalupo examines the ways in which Poe integrated the visual art he knew into sketches, tales, and literary criticism, paying close attention to the sculptures and paintings he saw in books, magazines, and museums while living in Philadelphia and New York from 1838 until his death in 1849. She argues that Poe’s sensitivity to the visual media gives his writing a distinctive “graphicality” (Poe’s coinage). While Poe is most often associated with the macabre, Cantalupo shows how it was his enduring love of beauty and knowledge of the visual arts that enabled him to note and use what he saw as a writer.
Exploring the relationship between visual art and literature in the Romantic period, this book makes a claim for a sister-arts 'moment' when the relationship between painting, sculpture, pottery and ...poetry held special potential for visual artists, engravers and artisans. Elaborating these cultural tensions and associations through a number of case studies, Thora Brylowe sheds light on often untold narratives of English labouring craftsmen and artists as they translated the literary into the visual. Brylowe investigates examples from across the visual spectrum including artefacts, such as Wedgwood's Portland Vase, antiquarianism through the work of William Blake, the career of engraver John Landseer, and the growing influence of libraries and galleries in the period, particularly Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Brylowe artfully traces the shifting cultural connections between the imaginative word and the image in a period that saw new print technologies deluge Britain with its first mass media.
Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They ...transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world.
Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.
Images of Beckett combines John Haynes' unique repertoire of photographs of Beckett's dramatic opus alongside three newly written essays by Beckett's biographer and friend, James Knowlson. Haynes ...captures images of Beckett's work in progress and performance and includes hitherto unknown portraits of Beckett himself. Haynes was privileged to be present at the Royal Court Theatre, London, when Beckett directed his own plays. Amongst the 75 plates are compositions that include the leading interpreters of the plays. Knowlson's first essay combines a verbal portrait of Beckett with a personal memoir of the writer; the second considers the influence of paintings that Beckett loved or admired on his theatrical imagery; and the third offers a detailed, often first-hand, account of Beckett's work as a director of his own plays. The essays are the result of personal conversations with Beckett and attendance at rehearsals, and provide a privileged glimpse into the world of one of the theatre's most influential and enduring playwrights.
Innovative and accessibly written, Picturing Scotland examines the genesis and production of the first author-approved illustrations for Sir Walter' Scott's Waverley novels in Scotland. Consulting ...numerous neglected primary sources, Richard J. Hill demonstrates that Scott, usually seen as disinterested in the mechanics of publishing, actually was at the forefront of one of the most innovative publishing and printing trends, the illustrated novel. Hill examines the historical precedents, influences, and innovations behind the creation of the illustrated editions, tracking Scott's personal interaction with the mechanics of the printing and illustration process, as well as Scott's opinions on visual representations of literary scenes. Of particular interest is Scott's relationships with William Allan and Alexander Nasmyth, two important early nineteenth-century Scottish artists. As the first illustrators of the Waverley novels, their work provided a template for one of the more lucrative publishing phenomena. Informed by meticulous close readings of Scott's novels and augmented by a bibliographic catalogue of illustrations, Picturing Scotland is an important contribution to Scott studies, the development of the illustrated novel, and publishing history.
An exploration of the compositional methods and sources of Leonardo's fables to investigate their relationship with illustrations and scientific studies.
In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to ...the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion. Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.
This volume emphasises the centrality of Katherine Mansfield to the cultural life of her time, illuminating how her love of painting and of music inspired her art.
