Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France

by David H. T. Scott

• ISBN13: 9780521110594
• ISBN10: 0521110599
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text. This interest encouraged writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud to recreate in language some of the vivid, sensual impact of the graphic or painterly image. This was to be achieved by organising texts according to aesthetic criteria so that as far as possible the form of the text as visually perceived would be closely interrelated to its content as reconstructed through the reading process. The result of this development was a radical redefinition of the scope and function of poetry, raising important general questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the visual image that are still very much of concern today.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Poetry and painting

The poet as art critic

Visual sources

The aesthetics of prosody

The art of transposition

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.