Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint

Přední strana obálky
Kent State University Press, 1997 - Počet stran: 205
Throughout his professional life, Herman Melville displayed a keen interest in the visual arts. He alluded to works of art to embellish his poems and novels and made substantial use of the technique of ekphrasis, the literary description of works of visual arts, to give body to plot and character. In carefully tracing Melville's use of the art analogy as a literary technique, Douglas Robillard shows how Melville evolved as a writer. Melville studied histories of art, lives of painters, and aesthetic treatises, went to museums and exhibitions of art works, made pilgrimages to the art centers of Europe during the 1840s and 1850s, and collected prints and illustrated books. He created narrators and central characters--Wellingborough Redburn, Ishmael, Pierre Glendinning, and Clarel--who were sensitive to the arts and capable of seeing and describing the world in painterly terms. Robillard also explores the works of the predecessors and contemporaries that influenced Melville and shows how his sense of form was instructed by design in works of art. In separate chapters Robillard deals at length with Redburn, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Clarel. In briefer discussions he looks at The Piazza Tales and the shorter poems. His extensive history of what Melville saw, responded to, and valued offers new insights into Melville's creative processes.

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Obsah

I Shall Ere Long Paint to you as well as One Can Without Canvas
1
Old Blurred Bewrinkled Mezzotint
20
Mythological OilPaintings
47
Less Erroneous Pictures
70
A Strangers Head by an Unknown Hand
99
Dwell on Those Etchings in the Night
123
Wanderings after the Picturesque xvii
158
20
167
47
179
R + 70
180
Notes
183
Bibliography
189
Index
194
189
199
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