Description
Book SynopsisThis comparative, interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between literature and the visual arts in France and Britain from 1750-1900. Through a close examination of the prose writings of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, read against the background of contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and theories of language, In the Mind’s Eye proposes a new interpretation of the influence and rivalries underlying the development of art criticism as a genre during this period. The visual impulse – the desire to transcend the limitations of language and make the reader see – is located within the historical traditions of ekphrasis, enargeia and the paragone, while in each chapter, the individual author’s theories of the mind, memory and imagination provide a critical framework for his stylistic experiments. In the Mind’s Eye presents an in-depth analysis of the cultural, theoretical and aesthetic implications of artistic border crossings, and by contextualizing the movement toward visual/verbal hybridity in the fiction and criticism of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, brings new perspectives to nineteenth-century studies in art and literature.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction The Visual Impulse in Prose: Border Crossings and the Anxieties of Interdisciplinarity Chapter 1 Towards a Visual Discourse: Theories of the Origin of Language, Enargeia, Ekphrasis and Associationism Chapter 2 Diderot’s Visual Prose: Gesture, Hieroglyph and the Visual Imagination Chapter 3 Baudelaire and the Salons: The Critic as Artist Chapter 4 Les Paradis Artificiels, Le Surnaturel and the Prose Poem : The Aesthetics of Psychological Flânerie Chapter 5 Ruskin and the Language of Images Chapter 6 Ruskin’s Moving Images: The Politics and the Poetics of the Paragone Conclusion Diderot, Baudelaire, Ruskin: Envisioning Visionaries Bibliography
