Fiction & imagination in early cinema: a philosophical approach to film history

textual paintings. Starting with relating Poe’s life to the popularity of illustrated books at the time, the chapter then shows a nuanced understanding of ‘Poe as a painter of landscapes, Poe as a painter of effects, and Poe as an art “expert”’ (93). To do so, theories are used widely, including ekphrasis and paragone, as in other chapters, but also enargeia (‘the visuality’) and ekpledzis (the development of an ‘enthralling mental image’) (93). All these prepare for an informed conclusion that establishes Poe, with his ‘complete works of art’, as an artist in the fullest sense (108). While Part II and III are set in the nineteenth-century Britain and the twentieth century US respectively, Part IV: ‘Where the Future Lies: Transatlantic Interdisciplinarity’ moves on to the encounters between both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter 9 from Part IV introduces José Joaquín de Mora as a Spanish contemporary of Blake, Shelley and Byron, focusing on his book-length ‘experimental engagement with the visual poetics of Blake’ and its transatlantic circulation (145–6). The chapter, by reading de Mora’s re-creation of ‘the Blakean non-mimetic interplay between word and image’ (146), presents the Hispanic text as an excellent example of the intricacies of the network of word-image relations. The implication that the 1820 text anticipates future interdisciplinarity of the same kind, however, is not fully fleshed out. The selection of writers and texts in Painting Words may be narrow in geographical scope; but with its twofold focus on ‘the pictorial ability of language to stir the reader’s imagination and the way illustrators have “read” literary works over the course of centuries’ (i), the book proves itself to be a useful body of work about the intersection and interdependence of the verbal and visual arts. It also intriguingly suggests that the future of this inter-arts symbiosis is developing in multifarious forms.