Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings is an international collection of essays written by seasoned and emerging scholars. This book explores, discusses, and provides new perspectives on Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by poems and poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, ranging from the inauguration of the movement in 1848 until the end of the nineteenth century. Through a textual and visual journey, this work reflects an innovative approach to Pre-Raphaelite art and Victorian poetry. The rationale in collating this collection of essays is to suggest new approaches for studies in Victorian visual and verbal art. This collection urges new ways of looking at Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry and its dynamic impact on the changing face of Victorian artistic practices through the second half of the nineteenth century, re-evaluating the extent to which this relatively short-lived movement influenced diverse writers and artists and their work. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian poetry and painting, and the intersection between them.
Industry Reviews
"This international collection not only reconsiders how painting and poetry enrich each other, but also extends the nature of ekphrasis itself beyond its traditional boundaries, as a method of expressing gendered spatial relations, as an extension of the artist's own self, as a mode capable equally of releasing a subject into view as it is of representing an object. Of particular note are the essays enabling us to see how the sister-arts reveal what is interior, reminding us that a poem is as much introspection as it is a visual event. It is a collection in which an artist's experiments are reframed as stylistic innovations, biographical interpretation is replaced with arguments about intertextual framework, and the voiceless receive both faces and voices. Reading these essays produces, as one author suggests, a 'violent delight,' asking us to consider what questions we have not been asking and which we need to ask now."
Bryn Gribben, Seattle University
