Description
Book SynopsisWhat makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Through close readings of nineteenth-century portrait stories from different literary traditions, the book analyzes the way subjectivity is produced in relation to representations, focusing on the power to represent, especially its relation to gender, and on the act of seeing.
Trade Review"With its broad international reach, its canny and often remarkable choices, its solid scholarship and linguistic grounding, and its theoretical engagement, Portrait Stories opens up significant new perspectives on the literature of a century." -- -Marshall Brown University of Washington "Ginsburg makes an engaging and significant contribution by identifying portraits and portraiture as an important topos in nineteenth-century European narrative literature." -- -Ross Chambers University of Michigan "Mixing well-known work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray with relatively undiscussed examples by Honore de Balzac and George Sand, Ginsburg defines a new corpus and isolates the multiple ways in which subject and representation are entangled with each other and the act of readerly interpretation ." -SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1 Poe's "Oval Portrait" 2 The Portrait's Two Faces: James's "The Special Type" and "The Tone of Time" 3 The Portrait Painter and His Doubles: Hoffmann's "Die Doppeltganger," Gautier's "La Cafetiere," and Nerval's "Portrait du diable" 4 On Portraits, Painters, and Women: Balzac's La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and James's "Glasses" 5 Portraits of the Male Body: Kleist's "Der Findling," Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe," and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray 6 Portraits, Parents, and Children: Storm's "Aquis submersus" and Sand's "Le Chateau de Pictordu" 7 Gogol: "The Portrait" Afterword: Reading Portrait Stories Works Cited
