ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art explores the links between literature and visual art from classical ekphrasis through to contemporary experimental forms. The collection’s engagement with diverse literary and cultural artifacts offers a comprehensive survey of the vibrant interrelationships that currently inform literary studies and the arts.

Featuring four sections, the first part provides an overview of theoretical approaches to art and literature from philosophy and aesthetics through to cognitive neuroscience. Part two examines one of the most important intersections between text and image: the workings of ekphrasis across poetry, fiction, drama, comics, life and travel writing, and architectural treatises. Parts three and four consider intermedial crossings from antiquity to the present. The contributors examine the rich intermedial experiments that range from manuscript studies to infographics in graphic narratives, illuminating the vibrant ways in which texts have intersected with illustration, music, dance, architecture, painting, photography, media installations, and television.

Throughout this dynamic collection of 37 chapters, the contributors evolve existing critical debates in innovative new directions. The volume will be a critical resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as specialist scholars working in literary studies, philosophy of art, text and image studies, and visual culture.

The Introduction and Chapters 10, 14 and 37 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at  https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license. 

part I|109 pages

Aesthetics, Art, and Literature Theoretical Concerns

chapter 1|11 pages

The Concept of Literature

chapter 2|14 pages

Cracking the Mirror

Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

chapter 3|11 pages

Literature, Art, Craft

chapter 4|9 pages

Beauty as Interaction

chapter 5|12 pages

Figuration

The Cinematic in Literature

chapter 6|12 pages

A New Science of Aesthetics

The Dual Brain Mechanics of Beauty, Wonder, and the Sublime

chapter 9|15 pages

“Go and catch a falling star”

Embodiment, Cognition, and Imagery

part II|128 pages

Ekphrastic Encounters

chapter 14|13 pages

Negotiating the In-Between

Culture as “A Gift that Circulates and which No One Owns” in Nick Joaquín's “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes”

chapter 16|12 pages

Making Magic

Comics and the Ekphrastic Art of the Almost There

chapter 17|9 pages

Ekphrasis

Art and Texts on Art in the Ottoman World

chapter 18|10 pages

“Wildly visual”

Bouvier, Synge, and Flaherty on the Aran Islands

chapter 19|12 pages

A Matisse Story

A. S. Byatt's “A Lamia in the Cévennes” and the Religion of Happiness

chapter 20|10 pages

Art–Life–Planet

Ekphrasis Today

part III|111 pages

Intermedial CrossingsFrom Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

chapter 21|23 pages

Vispo

A History of Visual Poetry

chapter 22|26 pages

Entwining Ephemeral with the Eternal

Locus, Conca, and Margarita at Conques

chapter 23|11 pages

Representing Truth in Illuminated Arthurian Manuscripts

Specular Encounters and the Meta Image

chapter 27|13 pages

Delacroix Reads Ivanhoe

“Painting Thoughts”

part IV|143 pages

Intermedial CrossingsFrom Modernism to the Present

chapter 28|19 pages

Another Turn of the Screw

Illustration as Interpretation

chapter 29|13 pages

Driving the Plot through Color

chapter 32|15 pages

Inscribed Sites

Verbal Art in Postmodern Built Environments

chapter 33|14 pages

Detritus art after WWII

Impoverishment, Collage, and the Inoperative Tradition

chapter 34|15 pages

Behind the Painting, A Pantoum

Literature and Art and Southeast Asia

chapter 35|13 pages

Bridging Worlds

Infographics, Maps, and Photographs in Graphic Novels

chapter 37|14 pages

Concealed Strokes

Fu-bi as Aesthetic Principle