{"title":"Ut pictura poesis: Ekphrasis, Genre Painting and Still Life in Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood and Alice Thompson","authors":"E. Ciobanu","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0003","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines descriptions of persons, objects or scenes in three novels, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Thompson’s The Book Collector, which either straightforwardly or obliquely evoke various painting genres. I argue that although ekphrasis typically names nowadays “the verbal representation of visual representation” (James Heffernan), certain descriptions beg for a revision of the modern category of ekphrasis. My present corpus includes both ekphrases ‘proper’ and descriptions which evoke, without referring to, portraits, still lifes or genre paintings. I call the latter category readerly reverse ekphrasis, to emphasise the reader’s co-operation with the author – during the reading process – to determine, beyond the painterly affinities of the description, its structural makeup as ekphrasis.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"33 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American, British and Canadian Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0003","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract This article examines descriptions of persons, objects or scenes in three novels, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Thompson’s The Book Collector, which either straightforwardly or obliquely evoke various painting genres. I argue that although ekphrasis typically names nowadays “the verbal representation of visual representation” (James Heffernan), certain descriptions beg for a revision of the modern category of ekphrasis. My present corpus includes both ekphrases ‘proper’ and descriptions which evoke, without referring to, portraits, still lifes or genre paintings. I call the latter category readerly reverse ekphrasis, to emphasise the reader’s co-operation with the author – during the reading process – to determine, beyond the painterly affinities of the description, its structural makeup as ekphrasis.
期刊介绍：
Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.
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