Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art - Hardcover

Fowler, Alastair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199259585 ISBN 13: 9780199259588

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Early narratives have tended to be critiqued as novels, an approach that misses their distinctive Renaissance realism. Alastair Fowler surveys picturing and perspective from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, drawing analogies between literature and visual art. The book is based on the history of the narrative imagination after single-point perspective. The habit of an older, multi-point perspective long continued, accounting for "anachronism," discontinuous realism, "double time-schemes," and depiction of different moments as simultaneous.

About this title

About the Author

Professor Alastair Fowler is Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh.

Review

"Fowler's Renaissance Realism certainly deserves the highest commendation for asking large and recently neglected questions about the nature of mimesis before modernity, and it affords a wealth of persuasive evidence for the contention that viewing habits changed only gradually over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."--Times Literary Supplement

"The encyclopedic learning, the crisp interpretations of major texts by Spenser and Shakespeare along with countless works adduced in passing and the 121 pertinent illustrations all make this an invaluable book for advanced scholars in Renaissance English literature. Highly recommended."--Choice

"An admirable study by the eminent Alastair Fowler."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0199259585
• ISBN 13: 9780199259588
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304