Literary Realism And The Ekphrastic Tradition

Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition examines representative texts and the theories of realism upon which they are based. It studies the foundations of these theories in the philosophies of language contemporaneous with them. Beginning with Adamicism, Mack Smith looks at the way humanist, rationalist, empiricist, Kantian, positivist, and poststructuralist theories of language are textually dramatized. He considers the cultural and personal influences that affect historical notions of realism and reality. He also demonstrates the rhetorical basis of realism by considering a mimetic device used by novelists in rendering a faithful version of reality&—ekphrasis, the narrative description of a work of art. Smith seeks a middle ground between the extremes of theory and interpretation, discourse and reality, and textualism and history, thus making an important contribution to the revaluation of literary studies.

The process of shaping cultural identity in colonial Spanish America has occurred as much through the medium of pictures as through the medium of writing. Focused on writing that references visual texts (ekphrasis), Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing examined the way words about pictures in the writing of three Spanish American Creoles negotiate the challenges that confronted the ruling elite in Spanish America during the contentious period between the Conquest and Independence.

Remembered Words is a selection of Alastair Fowler's essays on genre, realism, and the emblem (three interrelated subjects), published over six decades. It offers readers a way to arrive at a sense of how approaches to these subjects have changed over that period. Specifically, it shows how genre has come to be understood in terms of family resemblance theory. Remembered Words argues that realism can be seen as altering historically, so that Renaissance realism, for example, differs from those of later periods. Similar changes are traced in the emblem, which Fowler shows to be not only a particular genre, but an element of various kinds of realism. Famous passages in ancient literature are remembered in the familiar emblems of the Renaissance; and Renaissance emblems form the basis of metaphors in later literature. Meanwhile, the general approach of the critic and the reader has been altering over the years—as becomes evident when one takes into account the time-scale of sixty years (an unusually long working life for a critic). Modern theoretical approaches—which are often casually regarded as self-evident—may appear less inevitable and more arbitrary. This is not to say that they are necessarily wrong, just that they need to be argued for. Remembered Words is intended for senior undergraduates and for graduate students, who may use it to form ideas of Fowler's approach and that of his contemporaries and predecessors over the last half century.

Robyn. J. Whitaker interprets the Book of Revelation within the context of ancient rhetoric and religion. She argues that the author of Revelation uses a popular rhetorical tool, ekphrasis, to paint word-pictures of God that compete with material images to both critique image-making and simultaneously make an absent God present.

Examining a wide range of ekphrastic poems, David Kennedy argues that contemporary British poets writing out of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions challenge established critical models of ekphrasis with work that is more complex than representational or counter-representational responses to paintings in museums and galleries. Even when the poem appears to be straightforwardly representational, it is often selectively so, producing a 'virtual' work that doesn't exist in actuality. Poets such as Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Hughes, and Gillian Clarke, Kennedy suggests, relish the ekphrastic encounter as one in which word and image become mutually destabilizing. Similarly, other poets engage with the source artwork as a performance that participates in the ethical realm. Showing that the ethical turn in ekphrastic poetry is often powerfully gendered, Kennedy also surveys a range of ekphrastic poets from the Renaissance and nineteenth century to trace a tradition of female ekphrastic poetry that includes Pauline Stainer and Frances Presley. Kennedy concludes with a critique of ekphrastic exercises in creative writing teaching, proposing that ekphrastic writing that takes greater account of performance spectatorship may offer more fruitful models for the classroom than the narrativizing of images.

This collection focuses on texts that address the other arts – from painting to photography, from the stage to the screen, and from avant-garde experiments to mass culture. Despite their diversity of object and approach, the essays in Relational Designs coalesce around the argument that representations are defined by relations and dynamics, rather than intrinsic features. This rationale is supported by the discourses and methodologies favoured by the book’s contributors: their approaches offer a cross section of the intellectual and critical environment of our time. The book illustrates the critical possibilities that derive from the broad range of modes of inquiry - poststructuralist criticism, gender studies, postcolonial studies, new historicism – that the book’s four sections bring to bear on a wealth of intermedial practices. But Relational Designs compounds such critical emphases with the voice of the practitioner: the book is rounded off by an interview in which a contemporary novelist discusses her attraction to the other arts in terms that extend the book’s insights and bridge the gap between academic discourse and artistic practice.

Examining a wide range of ekphrastic poems, David Kennedy argues that contemporary British poets writing out of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions challenge established critical models of ekphrasis with work that is more complex than representational or counter-representational responses to paintings in museums and galleries. Even when the poem appears to be straightforwardly representational, it is often selectively so, producing a 'virtual' work that doesn't exist in actuality. Poets such as Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Hughes, and Gillian Clarke, Kennedy suggests, relish the ekphrastic encounter as one in which word and image become mutually destabilizing. Similarly, other poets engage with the source artwork as a performance that participates in the ethical realm. Showing that the ethical turn in ekphrastic poetry is often powerfully gendered, Kennedy also surveys a range of ekphrastic poets from the Renaissance and nineteenth century to trace a tradition of female ekphrastic poetry that includes Pauline Stainer and Frances Presley. Kennedy concludes with a critique of ekphrastic exercises in creative writing teaching, proposing that ekphrastic writing that takes greater account of performance spectatorship may offer more fruitful models for the classroom than the narrativizing of images.

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.