A FAMILIAR UNMISTAKABLE DIFFERENCE: Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. By RUTH BERNARD YEAZELL

Abstract

‘How is a novel written in nineteenth-century Britain or France like a picture painted in seventeenth-century Holland?’ Ruth Bernard Yeazell seems almost embarrassed by the widely suggestive appeal of her book's title, determined, through serious scholarship, to prove that ‘to pose this question is not to engage in a modern parlor game’, but rather ‘to address a problem in the history of taste: what did the art of the Dutch Golden Age mean to the nineteenth century?’ Implicitly defining her study against that of Mario Praz, who in her view does not so much ‘analyse’ as ‘indulge’ the analogy between genre painting and realism, Yeazell radically reframes the question in her own terms. Sidestepping the slippery question of an inherent affinity between the two art forms, she opts instead for a steadily historicist focus on how four particular novelists, and the literary culture to which they belonged, construed the relation.