Victorian Contexts: Literature and the Visual Arts

by Murray Roston

Overview

What, if any, is the relationship between Charles Dickens and the decorative arts? Between Henry James and Art Nouveau? Between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the paintings of the Impressionists?
Recent trends in scholarship have begun to reassess the assumption that the arts of painting and literature are too fundamentally disparate to permit a fruitful comparison between the two. In Victorian Contexts, Murray Roston puts that assumption to rest with imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, painting, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century. Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, he argues that in every generation there is a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way.
Eminently readable, Victorian Contexts is accessible to general readers as well as scholars of literature, the visual arts, and nineteenth-century culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814774854
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	12/01/1996
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

Murray Roston is Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and has been a visiting professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Virginia. He is also the author of Victorian Contexts: Literature and the Visual Arts (NYU).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements - List of Illustrations - Introduction - Carlyle's Fire-Baptism - The Fallen Woman - Commodity Culture in Dickens and Browning - George Eliot and the Horizons of Expectation - Hopkins as Poetic Innovator - The Art of Henry James - Notes - Index

Editorial Reviews

Roston (English, Bar Ilan U., Israel) looks at shared themes in literature, paintings, architecture, and crafts of the 19th century. Includes chapters on commodity culture in Dickens and Browning, Hopkins as poetic innovator, and the art of Henry James. Of interest to scholars of literature, visual arts, and 19th-century culture. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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