Encounters: A Collection of Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts

This exploration of encounters between the written word and the visual imagination brings together essays which cover a wide range of periods - from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.
It introduces the reader to the prevailing attitudes and artistic movements in each chosen period, and explores specific examples of the relationships between the arts. The collection includes discussions of Piers Plowman, analogies between the Elizabethan arts, the obsession w ith the idea of ut pictura poesis during the seventeenth century, modes of examining artistic structures in the eighteenth, parallels between Turner and English romantic poetry, Dickens' debt to the traditions of graphic caricature, and the importance of the visual arts in the development of Wallace Stevens' poetry.
The aim of Encounters is to develop in the student an awareness of visual parallels which he may not have been encouraged to perceive for himself. To that end, each of the seven contributors - distinguished scholars from both sides of the Atlantic - provides literary texts with the relevant visual analogues which vividly illuminate both creative and cultural origins.

This book also serves to introduce a new series of cross-disciplinary texts which are shortly to be published by Studio Vista. Among the first titles will be Ezra Pound, the Vorticists, and the visual arts by Tom Parkinson ; W. B. Yeats: Image-statue-dream by Bernard Harris and The sleep of reason: Goya, Gil/ray, and the iconography of a revolutionary people by Gwyn Williams. In these illustrated studies, ideas touched upon in Encounters will be explored in far greater depths. Results of the serious attention being paid by some of today's outstanding scholars to this important new area of research - the arts and their relationship one to another - will for the first time be made available to the student.