Pictures of Romance

Form against Context in Painting and Literature

Steiner Wendy

How do pictures tell stories? Why does the literary romance so often refer to paintings and other visual art objects? Beginning with these two seemingly unrelated questions, Wendy Steiner reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and the literary romance.

Romances violate the casual, temporal, and logical cohesiveness of realist novels, and they do so in part by depicting love as a state of suspension, a condition outside of time. Steiner argues that because Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting also represents a suspended moment of perception with "unnatural" clarity and compression of meaning, it readily serves the romance as a symbol of antirealism. Yet the atemporality of stopped-action painting was actually an attempt to achieve pictorial realism – the way things "really" look. It is this paradox that interests Steiner: to signal their departure from realism, romances evoke the symbol of "realistic" visual artwork. Steiner explores this problem through analyses of Keats, Hawthorne, Joyce, and Picasso. She then examines a return to narrative conventions in visual art in the twentieth century, in the work of Lichtenstein and Warhol, and speculates on the fate of pictorial storytelling and the romance in postmodern art. An aesthetic fantasia of sorts, this study combines theory and analysis to illuminate an unexpected interconnection between literature and the visual arts.

Contents:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Pictorial Narrativity
2".As Long as Eyes Can See and Beauty Reigns": The Visual Arts in Romance
3. Empowering the Perceiver: Keats
4. Virgins, Copyists, and the Gentle Reader: Hawthorne
5. A Renaissance-Modernist Dalliance: Joyce and Picasso
6. Divide and Narrate: Seurat, Warhol, and Lichtenstein
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a wide-ranging cultural critic who has written for the "New York Times", "Los Angeles Times", "Nation", "London Review of Books", and the "Times Literary Supplement". She is the author of many books, including, most recently, "Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art".

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