Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature

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University of Chicago Press, 1988 - Art - 218 pages
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.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Pictorial Narrativity
7
As Long as Eyes Can See and Beauty Reigns The Visual Arts in Romance
43
Empowering the Perceiver Keats
56
Virgins Copyists and the Gentle Reader Hawthorne
91
A RenaissanceModernist Dalliance Joyce and Picasso
121
Divide and Narrate Seurat Warhol and Lichtenstein
144
Conclusion
185
Notes
189
Bibliography
205
Index
211
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