University of Wales Press Rimbauds Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality (University of Wales Press - European Visual Cultures) (Studies in Visual Culture)

Product Description In the mid-nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud, the volatile genius of French poetry, invented a language that captured the energy and visual complexity of the modern world. This book explores some of the technical aspects of this language in relation to the new techniques brought forth by the Impressionist painters such as Monet, Morisot, and Pissarro. Review The scope of Rimbauds Impressionist Poetics is even broader than the title suggests: not only does Aimée Israel-Pelletier demonstrate Rimbauds affinities with Impressionism, but she also relates him to realism and to the cultural and political climate of late nineteenth-century France, a watershed period in the history of vision and poetry; not only does she deal with Rimbauds poetics, his theories of vision, but she also reinforces her compelling argument with ample discussion of his poems. Indeed, these incisive analyses illustrate the interaction of the visual and verbal languages at the most basic level, making her book at once comprehensive and concrete. Her argument is consistently lucid and uncluttered, her style straight-forward and jargon-free, resulting in a book that will prove attractive to experts in all of the many fields with which it intersects, yet accessible to the general reading public. In short, this fascinating study is also a great read. --William J. Berg, University of Wisconsin-Madison About the Author Dr Aimée Israel-Pelletier is Associate Professor and Head of French at the University of Texas at Arlington