Renaissance Realism Narrative Images in Literature and Art

by Fowler, Alastair

• ISBN13: 9780199259588
• ISBN10: 0199259585
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book questions the assumption of a single realism, the continuous realism of novels. Many suppose that narrative before the novel either looked forward to it or was medieval and allegorical, and compare the introduction of single-point perspective with the rise of the novel. Butcontinuous realism did not arise as soon as perspective was discovered. In actuality, a distinctive sort of Renaissance realism, with its own conventions, was practised from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Renaissance Realism surveys the history of perspective, showing that it onlygradually came to dominate the western imagination and to become the default assumption for portrayal in the visual arts. Looked at in this way, correlates between literature and art emerge in the depiction of objects and events. Treatment of spatial arrangement and time sequences, for example,closely parallel 'simultaneous narration' in the visual arts.

Author Biography

Alastair Fowler is Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh, and was formerly Professor of English, University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Illustrations

Glossary

Abbreviations

Objects in space

Events in time

Time sequences and schemes

Narrative assumptions

Engaged and disengaged spectators

Britomart and Busirane

Shakespeare's realism

Conclusion

Index

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