Manchester University Press Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. In the past twenty five years numerous books and articles have appeared covering different aspects of ekphrasis, with scholars arguing that it is a fundamental means by which writers have explored the nature of aesthetic experience. However many critics continue to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. Ekphrastic encounters seeks to complicate this critical paradigm, and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect and intersubjectivity. The book brings together leading scholars working in the fields of literary studies, history of art, modern languages and comparative literature, and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. The chapters in the book are critically and methodologically wide-ranging; yet they share an interest in challenging the paragonal model of ekphrasis that has been prevalent since the early 1990s, and establishing a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter. This exciting and interdisciplinary collection will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between literature and the visual arts, as well as students and scholars of comparative literature, cultural studies, and history of art.