Abstract
A colleague recently enquired, with a hint of exasperation, why books exploring the relationship between literature and the visual arts invariably begin with an apology, a defence of intermedia investigation, when the principle behind such enquiry is so self-evident. In all eras, he remarked, both writer and artist create their work from within the same cultural setting and hence inevitably express to a larger or lesser extent the dominant concerns of their time.
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Notes and References
The quotations are from Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks (London, 1954), 2:211, and
Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1806), 1:52. The widespread use of the phrase in the Renaissance is discussed in
Joel E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1920), p. 42. See also
Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: the humanistic theory of painting (New York, 1967).
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: the circulation of social energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), p. 86, and
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London, 1970), p. xi.
Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: problems in the relation between modern literature and painting (Chicago, 1982), has seen in semiotic theory renewed justification for comparisons between art and literature in the modern period; but the principle clearly needs to be extended to include past eras too.
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), p. 40. His approach developed further in his Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (New Haven, 1985). See also
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: the logic of gaze (New Haven, 1983), especially pp. xii-xiii, and his introduction to Calligram: essays in New Art History from Prance (Cambridge, 1988), p. xxv, as well as
Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History (New Haven, 1989), especially pp. 48–50, the useful collections of essays in
A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds), The New Art History (London, 1986), and
Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds), The Language of Art History (Cambridge, 1993).
The jacket quotation is from Alan Brien of the Sunday Telegraph. John Galbraith’s essay is reprinted in Philip C. Kolin and J. Madison David (eds), Critical Essays on Edward Albee (Boston, 1986).
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 113.
Cf. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: a literary guide (Berkeley, 1995) and the valuable collection of essays in
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: a guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (London, 1991).
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, published posthumously (London, 1989), like most Marxist criticism, attributes all developments in the period — literary, artistic and philosophical — to exclusively economic or socioeconomic causes.
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© 2000 Murray Roston
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Roston, M. (2000). Introduction. In: Modernist Patterns. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389403_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389403_1
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