Continuing with the theme of his work Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts, Murray Roston applies to a later period the same critical principle: that for each generation there exists a central complex of inherited ideas and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist and writer responds in his or her own way. Roston demonstrates that what emerges is not a fixed or monolithic pattern for each generation but a dynamic series of responses to shared challenges. The book relates leading English writers and literary modes to contemporary developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture. "A sumptuous book. . . . Clearly and gracefully written and cogently argued, Roston's admirable achievement is of paramount significance to literary studies, to cultural and art history, and to aesthetics. . . . Outstanding."--Choice Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of this century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns. In The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature Roston explores the strategies adopted by such mid-century authors as Greene, Salinger, Osborne, Baldwin and others in their attempt to cope with the spiritual vacuity - strategies including the emergence of the anti-hero and of literary existentialism - and offer in the course of the investigation fascinatingly new insights into their work.

"The essays in this collection expand the boundaries of inter-art studies, claiming that human beings have evolved to draw nourishment from pictures. Ellen Spolsky argues in a polemical introduction that the recognition of our embodied need for pictures, that is, our human iconotropism, provides a fresh way of understanding the relationship of works of art to their historical contexts."--Jacket.

In Narrative Strategies Roston focuses upon the Greene's texts themselves and their manipulation of reader response, highlighting the innovative strategies that Greene developed to cope with the mid-century invalidation of the traditional hero. The result is a stimulating new reading of the major novels.

Examines how both artist and writer in the Victorian era responded to the shared challenges, assumptions, and dilemmas of their time, often unaware that the same problems were being confronted in the kindred media. The placing of such writers as Dickens, G.Eliot, Hopkins, and Henry James within the context of Victorian painting, architecture, and interior design offers fresh insights into their works, as well as reassessments of such themes as the mid-century representation of the Fallen Woman or the impact of commodity culture upon contemporary aesthetic standards.

Images play an important role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. In this distinctive collection, editors Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers examine the connection between visual images and persuasion, or how images act rhetorically upon viewers. Chapters included here highlight the differences and commonalities among a variety of projects identified as "visual rhetoric," leading to a more precise definition of the term and its role in rhetorical studies. Contributions to this volume consider a wide variety of sites of image production--from architecture to paintings, from film to needlepoint--in order to understand how images and texts work upon readers as symbolic forms of representation. Each chapter discusses, analyzes, and explains the visual aspect of a particular subject, and illustrates the ways in which messages and meaning are communicated visually. The contributions include work from rhetoric scholars in the English and communication disciplines, and represent a variety of methodologies--theoretical, textual analysis, psychological research, and cultural studies, among others. The editors seek to demonstrate that every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals more possibilities for discussion, and that the recent "turn to the visual" has revealed an inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems, and objects for investigation. As a whole, the chapters presented here demonstrate the wide range of scholarship that is possible when a field begins to take seriously the analysis of images as important cultural and rhetorical forces. Defining Visual Rhetorics is appropriate for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in rhetoric, English, mass communication, cultural studies, technical communication, and visual studies. It will also serve as an insightful resource for researchers, scholars, and educators interested in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication studies.

In this study of Shakespeare's visual culture Frederick Kiefer looks at the personified characters created by Shakespeare in his plays, his walking, talking abstractions. These include Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter's Tale, Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost, Revenge in Titus Andronicus, and the deities in the late plays. All these personae take physical form on the stage: the actors performing the roles wear distinctive attire and carry appropriate props. The book seeks to reconstruct the appearance of Shakespeare's personified characters; to explain the symbolism of their costumes and props; and to assess the significance of these symbolic characters for the plays in which they appear. To accomplish this reconstruction, Kiefer brings together a wealth of visual and literary evidence including engravings, woodcuts, paintings, drawings, tapestries, emblems, civic pageants, masques, poetry and plays. The book contains over forty illustrations of personified characters in Shakespeare's time.

European Intertexts is the first fruit of an ongoing collaborative study aiming to challenge the isolationism of much critical work on English literature by exploring the interdependence of English and continental European literatures in writing by women. While later volumes will deal with specific texts, this introductory volume provides a descriptive framework and a theoretical basis for studies in the field. Covering issues such as the role of English as a world language, the definition of 'Europe', and the current state of Translation Studies, the book also surveys theories of intertextuality and demonstrates intertextual links between written and visual and film texts. This book is itself pioneering in making a systematic approach to women's writings in English in the context of other European cultures. Although Europe is a political reality, this cultural interpenetration remains largely unexamined, and these essays represent an important first step towards revealing that unexplored richness.

With their broken lines and hasty brushwork, sketches acquired enormous ideological and aesthetic power during the Romantic period in England. Whether publicly displayed or serving as the basis of a written genre, these rough drawings played a central role in the cultural ferment of the age by persuading audiences that less is more. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism investigates the varied implications of sketching in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culture. Calling on a wide range of literary and visual genres, Richard C. Sha examines the shifting economic and aesthetic value of the sketch in sources ranging from auction catalogs and sketching manuals to novels that employed scenes of sketching and courtship. He especially shows how sketching became a double-edged accomplishment for women when used to define "proper" femininity. Sha's work offers fresh readings of Austen, Gilpin, Wordsworth, and Byron, as well as less familiar writers, and provides sophisticated interpretations of visual sketches. As the first full-length work about sketching during the Romantic era, this volume is a rich interdisciplinary study of both representation and gender.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.