Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines ekphrasis in literary modernism?the verbal representation of visual artworks. In modernist studies the relationship between literature and painting has long been conceived as a "special," privileged, or important one, but scholars have predominantly attempted to describe this relationship from formalist perspectives?which imagine entities like "literature" and "painting" to be historically and epistemologically stable categories, operating the same way at all times and in all places?or from biographical perspectives?searching in writers' lives for evidence of contacts with paintings or artists in order to establish a narrative of influence. My project instead brings a cultural studies perspective to bear on this problem, arguing that the various modernisms it considers?both subjective and objective, British and American, avant-garde and nostalgic?can be understood as interrelated efforts to come to terms with contemporary changes in the production and reception of art that allowed it to reach unprecedentedly large international audiences, to be apprehended by geographically scattered and economically diverse publics. As technological innovations like photography and lithography made copies of paintings increasingly available, a dramatic surge in the number of art museums in America and the development of new venues for viewing art in European capitals made their originals more accessible as well. For the writers whose work I study?Henry James, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, and Gertrude Stein?this dispersal of modern artworks and their viewers was a paradoxical source of both anxiety and utopian potential, reflected in their efforts to declare literature incommensurate with painting.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
Access Conditions
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Citation
Blizard, Dawn E.,
"Authentic Modernism: Ekphrasis and Objecthood in British and American Literature of the Early Twentieth Century"
(2009).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0V12322
