Sister Arts Research Articles

Women Poets and the Sister Arts in Nineteenth-Century England

Classical antiquity gave us the notion of the arts as sisters, and Renaissance Italy the drama of their sibling rivalry. 1 In the "republic of taste" of eighteenth-century Britain, poetry, painting, and sculpture were companionable sisters, so long as the family of genres reflected the social order: pastoral verse and flower painting were classified as feminine pastimes suitable for lady amateurs; and epic poetry and history painting as masculine genres for gentlemen with a classical education or professional training. 2 While sculpture provided ideal forms for both painting and poetry, its practice was also considered the most masculine of occupations, requiring the skills of a workman and the study of human anatomy. Like their Romantic predecessors, Victorian women poets capitalized on the signs of cultivation and distinction reflected in the poetics of ut pictura poesis ("as a painting, so a poem") and used it to distinguish feminine amateurism from masculine artistry. This essay will suggest that it is worth exploring how the rise of professional women painters and sculptors in the nineteenth century informed various forms of sister arts verse by poets actively engaged with the concept of a rivalry among the arts. Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a host of other male poets responded in kind. But in their embodiment of the sister arts metaphor, I want to explore some of the complexities of sisterhood and rivalry expressed by several female poets and one art critic.

Sister Arts and Artists: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and the Life of Harriet Hosmer

Between 1853 and 1861 Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Hosmer, an American sculptor, were friends and collaborators, who were part of an extended network of expatriate women artists living in Italy. This essay argues that in her verse‐novel Aurora Leigh (1856), Barrett Browning uses sister arts analogies between sculpture and poetry in response not only to Romantic verse precedents but also to the hardships of women poets and sculptors struggling to become professionals in nineteenth‐century Europe.

Introduction: Literature and the Arts: A French Perspective on Visual Poetics, Language, and Artistic Representation

The fact that a spatial work of art doesn't speak can be interpreted in two ways. On one hand, there is idea of its absolute mutism, idea that it is completely foreign or heterogeneous to words. . . . But on other . . . we can always receive them, them, or interpret them as potential discourse. That is to say, these silent words are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses. (Jacques Derrida, in Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds. Deconstruction and Visual Arts)Much has been written on state of visual poetics and word-image relations and a certain malaise has developed as to \vhere art history and literary criticism are now heading. To be sure, theory, as it was called in 1980s, has had a profound influence on studies of iconotexts, ekphrasis and intertextuality. Structuralists and poststructuralist theoreticians-from Barthes and Kristeva, to Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida-have all, within their respective fields, expanded Horace's original concept of ut pictum poesis, which in art criticism, history, and literature meant correspondences of arts or the sister arts or even the mutual illumination of arts. Roland Barthes, for instance, taught world that everything from painting to objects, to practices, and to people, can be studied as texts. Barthes and Kristeva in his wake, made us see what semiology can do for understanding of cultures and social practices and their expression in images. Foucault, who treated any continuity with suspicion, opened our eyes to social production of meaning and its inscription through power while Lacanian psycho-analysis demonstrated how human subject is formed in play of gender difference. Finally, Jacques Derrida's statement that il n'y a pas de hors texte confirmed that there was no vantage point of reference outside of language from which truth claims of language itself can be verified. Yet, attractive and challenging as their viewpoints were, these theorists often faced cruel and unavoidable tensions between ideals of clarity and coherence that govern philosophy and inevitable shortcomings that accompany its application. As with many others, Foucault applied was often Foucault betrayed. These tensions between artists, writers, and philosophers constructed multi-level narratives of fragmented dissonances and equivocal authorship and yet resulting apparent disjunctive dialogue opened fascinating avenues of research and interests.Contributing to rapid dissemination of French theories in United States were excellent translations and collections of essays such as Norman Bryson's notable 1988 Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France which assembled works by Kristeva, Baudrillard, Marin, Foucault, and Barthes. In his collection Bryson contrasted Anglo-American approach in art history, and notably continuing perceptualist procedure as represented by E. H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion, with French insistence on sign, its social production and formation, and problems of power and control. Focusing on works from antiquity and Byzantium and on paintings by Masaccio, Raphael, Titian, Vermeer, and Manet among others, Bryson explained why classical European painting developed its particular technical features of composition, color, perspective, brushwork, and manipulation of narrative.Presently, question raised in visual poetics is whether connection has played itself out and whether interdisciplinary studies in art and literature have reached a cul-de-sac. I believe essays in this section will prove contrary. There are now new and creative ways in visual poetics; people are moving from literature to art history, from narratology to visual rhetoric, crossing interdisciplinary borders and moving beyond well-established word-image opposition. The articles are reflections on ideology, gendering, and vision, that urge us to consider images as rhetoric or encoded signs that must and can be read with tools provided by narratology and poststructural theories. …

Introduction

“The sister arts”: this time-worn notion tends to refer to literature and visual art, or, more narrowly, poetry and painting. It is predicated upon a firm distinction between the two. But Lessing happened some time ago. Mitchell's famous critique of the ideologies involved in maintaining the hierarchies between visual art and language notwithstanding, much energy in meetings and debates on “word and image studies” still goes into defending an essential distinction. Not so in John's work.

"Tristram and Iseult": Arnold's Ekphrastic Experiment

"Tristram and Iseult": Arnold's Ekphrastic Experiment LawrenceJ. Starsyk Arnold's use of a "ghostlike tapestry" (2. 151) in "Tristram and Iseult" raises numerous aesthetic questions concerning the relationship between verbal and visual representations.1 Murray Krieger's recent study of the ekphrastic tradition reminds us of the subservient position of the image to the word throughout most of the western tradition.2Consigned to silence and thus reliant for its voice on the verbal, the visual representation is, at best, the submissive handmaiden of the word and, at worst, a "dumb enchantment" threatening the imagination.3 The sexually privileged status of the male, typically associated with the word, completes the triumph over the visual, invariably regarded as female.4 Arnold's talking tapestry, a conventional strategy of Gothic literature and a manifestation of persistent classical pictorialism,5 however, departs from the norms of the ekphrastic contest by allowing at least a semblance of equality between his bard and the "stately huntsman" (2. 153). The eternal muteness of most images in the ekphrastic paragone. it can be argued, inevitably results in the empowerment of painted antagonists like Browning's Duchess and Tennyson's Gardener's Daughter who 'speak' despite their narrators' concerted Victorian Review (2002)25 L. Starzyk efforts at verbal monopoly.6 Arnold's huntsman, though, is permitted 19 lines (2. 164-183) of speech in which to exercise uncontested the dominance traditionally considered the word's. What I propose examining here is how Arnold's ekphrastic experiment chronicles, not the poet's understanding of the contest between the sister arts, but his aesthetic dialogue with himself regarding mimesis as revealed in the interplay between word and image.7 The seemingly endless repetitions mforming the poem, symbolized by the tapestry's recapitulation of the narrator's discourse with himself, indicates Arnold's general concern with the nature of repetition or recreation and, specifically, his heightened uncertainty regarding some immutable ground for the recurrent. Arnold's experiment underscores ekphrasis, not as a struggle for political or gendered dominance between the sister arts, but as mutual betrayal by traitorous doubles. * The nature of what the huntsman "seems to say" (2. 163) as he looks down at the dead Tristram and Iseult of Ireland amounts to simple equivalency, he "says," it seems, nothing substantially different from what the bard has already spoken. The tapestry, in fact, appears to function less as an ekphrastic antagonist in theparagone between word and image than as a Visual' echo of what the bard has said. The stately huntsman becomes, in this context, the puppet in the bard's ventriloquistic exercise, "the uproar in the echo" of a disguised Narcissus.8 And this "Piranesi" exercise9 is not confined simply to what is verbally articulated in the second part of the poem; it recapitulates most of the important issues raised in the first part as well: What place is this, and who are they? Who is diat kneeling lady fair? And on his pillows diat pale knight Who seems of marble on a tomb? 26volume 28 number 1 Arnold's Ekphrastic Experiment What, has some glamour made me sleep, And sent me with my dogs to sweep, By night, with boisterous bugle-peal Through some old, seaside knighdy hall, Not in the free greenwood at all? (2. 164-79) The answers to questions of identity and place have been delivered long before the bard introduces the tapestry, ostensibly to sanction the hunter's "bugle blow" (2. 188). The sleeping knight and praying lady will not be disturbed by the bugle blast, the bard replies, since both are dead. The talking tapestry seems, in the end, a rhetorical device employed, at best, to summarize key issues to this point and, at worst, to provide the bard with a conclusion for a section of his song he appears otherwise incapable of ending. A similar lack of artistry characterizes the bard's conclusion of part one of his song. The rhetorical questions he poses simultaneously to close the first part and introduce the second appear to be supererogatory: "What voices are these on the clear night-air? / What lights in the court — what steps on the stair?" (1. 372-3). If the...

Sterne et la musique, ou l’harmonie impossible

Critics have paradoxically paid only scant attention to Laurence Sterne 's frequent use of music in his literary works. However, William Freedman ’s book, Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel (1978), considers Tristram Shandy as a ‘musical novel, ' borrowing its forms from music. Whereas Freedman stresses the importance of the compositional models used by Sterne, this paper endeavours to study the meaning of the explicit mentions of music in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. It will be argued that the allusions to music contribute to establishing elements of uncertainty within the text. Music comes in when words reveal themselves unequal to their task of expressing ideas or feelings. It is the ultimate form of the untranslatable and, as such, it partakes of Sterne ’s intended deconstruction of language. Music is used as an element of transgression of the rules of the literary text and testifies therefore to a deep crisis in the literary process. At the same time, Sterne uses it dialectically to open up new vistas. Besides, the way Sterne used music implied that music should have become autonomous from the semantic. The evolution of musical theory in England in the second half of the 18th century enabled such an autonomization of music. Thus, instead of music taking poetry as its avowed model, as was the case with the theory of the ‘Sister Arts, ’ Sterne operated a kind of reversal of rôles, as music now imposed its expressive mode to the literary text. Music ’s essential mystery and its natural ability to stick closely to the unfolding of time, rendered it the ultimate metaphor of the elusive which was precisely what Sterne endeavoured to transcribe.

Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction by Lesley D. Clement

REVIEWS Lesley D. Clement. Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. 304. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Lesley D. Clement’s Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction is an impressive undertaking, and read­ ers o f Gallant will learn much about her story-writing tech­ niques. Clement takes us through Gallant’s work from her ear­ liest stories in the late 1940s published in Preview through to her most recent work in the New Yorker. For the most part Clement concentrates on Gallant’s visual portrayals of charac­ ters who are caught up in history in ways that make it difficult for them to be authentically part of the world they inhabit. As Clement’s title indicates, one of the main challenges in Gallant’s fiction is “learning to look” — which means to see the past in the present; that is, to see through what appears to be the ob­ vious surfaces to the socially and mentally constructed forms of self and society — a process that the stories demand of both the characters and the reader. In order to bring out the growing sophistication of Gallant’s depiction of our world, Clement turns to the language and con­ cepts of painting. Over the years many critics have commented on Gallant’s masterly use of imagery and painterly techniques. Clement takes this insight one step further in that she demon­ strates how Gallant’s stories mount “a challenge to the bound­ aries erected between the sister arts by embracing both spatial and temporal elements in her fiction” (x). The stories, she sug­ gests, portray characters inhabiting both time, in a sequence of events that march inescapably forward, and space, appre­ hended in a single moment. Clement suggests that Gallant’s early work draws on perspective and different narrative “lines” to develop her insights. The emphasis on line then turns, in the stories of the 1960s and early 1970s, into a rendering of framing and proportion. Later still, Gallant turns to the modulations of light and colour. In her most recent stories she employs the techniques of parody in which various narrative and conceptual planes are simultaneously set in motion. When she turns to the stories themselves, Clement begins naturally enough with early stories such as “Up North” and “Thank You for the Lovely Tea” ; she argues that Gallant em­ 313 ESC 28, 2002 ploys not only a fixed perspective for characters “paralysed through cowardice and inertia into inaction and non-being,” but also secondary perspectives that encourage the reader, if not the characters, to “break the frames enclosing them” (21). In the novel Green Water, Green Sky (1959), composed of connecting short stories, Clement shows how Gallant learned to dissolve the narrative frame by breaking down the difference between fore­ ground and background. Whereas the earlier stories portrayed characters who stood out against their historical background in heightened relief, in Green Water, Green Sky the characters find themselves floating in a world in which the horizon disappears through the merging of background and foreground. As Gallant’s story-telling techniques continued to mature, Clement shows how Gallant finds ever more subtle ways of de­ picting individuals caught in a world that denies them a fixed perspective. She argues persuasively that Gallant’s stories in the 1960s and early 1970s make “visible the consequences of the in­ visibility of symbolic power” (77). These stories lead the reader to penetrate the everyday surfaces through what Clement calls “gaps” and “vacancies” in the story line in order to find the un­ seen forces at work on the characters. This sense of the unseen becoming manifest for the reader, if not the characters, can best be seen in Gallant’s German stories such as “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” “W illi,” and “The Alien Flower,” although curiously enough Clement has little to say about one of her strongest stories, the novella “The Pegnitz Junction.” Clement is partic­ ularly effective in her treatment of the ways in which Gallant represents the inner displacements of people within a world of damaged landscapes in order to represent modern civilization as...

Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Alison A. Case (review)

the Worldto create Relations among Mankind;and Solitude is an unnaturalBeing to us' (p. 4I). In fact, Steele attributes these words to a fictitious female correspondent,in a paperwhich attemptsto account forthe popularityof'Women's Men'. The ability to endure solitude is implicitly equated with a discrete, independent, essentially male identity. Edward Young uses typically masculinist language in NightThoughts: 'O! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought, I Lost to the noble sallies of the mind, IWho think it solitude, to be alone' (iii. 6-8). Soubrenie notes here only the paradoxicalironywherebyeighteenth-centurypoetry 'se donne tous les moyens de ruiner ce qu'elle construit' (p. 29I). The domestic spaces in which ladiesendured so much lonelinessremain uncharted. Frequentreferences to the visual arts demand illustration.Soubrenie's keen eye for emotional geometry enables her to form an exciting synthesisbetween the sister arts of poetry, painting, and landscape gardening: 'Apres la ligne verticale de l'ascension, ou du plongeon thietrical dans les flots tumultueux, apres les lignes horizontales de l'infini de la mer, l'homme du XVIIIe siecle revient donc a un parcours sinueux, tout en courbes et en detours' (p. 202). Do these horticultural sinuositiesreflectdoubts about the dangers of solitude, 'si attrayantea la premiere vue' (p. I95)? Gifted with imaginative sensitivityand formidableacumen, Soubrenie reads her chosen texts on their own terms without losing critical balance. As she reveals the creativeenergyof Young'sJightThoughts andThomson's Seasons, contrastsCowper's effortsat communication with Smart'sobsessivestrugglefor expression,illuminates Matthew Green's heroic endeavours to view his own depressionwith detachment, findsa niche forJames Hervey'sprose meditations,unpacksthe ironiesof Cowper's Castawayand rescues Richard Savage's 'watry Grave' from the realm of cliche (pp. 163, 181), she inspiresrenewed interestin a group of authors,some of whom, even among eighteenth-centuryspecialists,are often littlemore than a name. UNIVERSITY OF READING CAROLYN D. WILLIAMS PlottingWomen. Gender andNarration intheEighteenthandNineteenth -Century British Novel. By ALISON A. CASE. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 1999. X+ 223 pp. $37.50. The title of Alison Case's book is misleading. PlottingWomen is not about women plottersat all;indeed, the book'scentralargumentdenieswomen thisrole. The only 'plottingwoman' is Case herself,who awardsthe technique of'feminine narration' the status of a literary convention, while at the same time arguing that it lacks coherence and meaning, has no moral authority, and cannot stand on its own within a text. The depressingconclusion of PlottingWomen is that the epistolaryor diary-writingheroine who tells her own tale, who is able to write 'I' with such compelling immediacy, has no adequate voice of her own. Since 'feminine narration'takes place in the immediate present, its narratorscannot 'shape' their own stories retrospectively, draw moral conclusions from past events, or 'plot' theirown futures.Worse,the 'femininenarrator'requiresthe helpof a male 'masternarrator 'or a male pseudo-editor,someone who can plot andpreach,fora narrative to functionproperly. Case's starting-point assumes that eighteenth and nineteenth-century authors accepted a prevailingethic of passivefemale virtue, and that theirreadersexpected literarytexts to supportthis kind of virtue. Any 'artfulness'on the part of a female character, Case maintains, undermines the virtue of the feminine narrator, thus risking the loss of reader sympathy. So, from Case's perspective, Defoe has no the Worldto create Relations among Mankind;and Solitude is an unnaturalBeing to us' (p. 4I). In fact, Steele attributes these words to a fictitious female correspondent,in a paperwhich attemptsto account forthe popularityof'Women's Men'. The ability to endure solitude is implicitly equated with a discrete, independent, essentially male identity. Edward Young uses typically masculinist language in NightThoughts: 'O! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought, I Lost to the noble sallies of the mind, IWho think it solitude, to be alone' (iii. 6-8). Soubrenie notes here only the paradoxicalironywherebyeighteenth-centurypoetry 'se donne tous les moyens de ruiner ce qu'elle construit' (p. 29I). The domestic spaces in which ladiesendured so much lonelinessremain uncharted. Frequentreferences to the visual arts demand illustration.Soubrenie's keen eye for emotional geometry enables her to form an exciting synthesisbetween the sister arts of poetry, painting, and landscape gardening: 'Apres la ligne verticale de l'ascension, ou du plongeon thietrical dans les flots tumultueux, apres les lignes horizontales de l'infini...

TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective

As film emerged as one of the dominant media of the twentieth century, critics often challenged its artistic credentials by alleging that it was nothing more than canned not an autonomous artform, but merely surrogate theater served up in celluloid. As a result, film theorists spilled a great deal of ink trying to prove that the medium of film is essentially different from that of theater and that, in consequence, the possibility that film could be an artform with equal standing as regards not only theater, but with respect, as well, to its other five sister arts had to be acknowledged. Undoubtedly, this theoretical debate was underwritten by the fact that film and theater were economic competitors for the same audiences. But whatever its material motivation, the debate was conducted in the philosophical idiom of essential differentiae rather than in terms of more lowly considerations, such as product differentiation. Similarly, the appearance of television (henceforth referred to as TV) engendered comparable anxieties of influence. Theoretical spokespersons for the new medium were at pains to differentiate TV from film to show that TV was not just an ersatz form of cinema. TV, it was claimed, had its own unique features, features distinct from those of cinema, which, at least in principle, opened up the possibility of an autonomous art of TV. As in the debate about theater and film, this discussion was frequently cast in terms of essential or ontological distinctions. And, of course, the Film/TV debate was probably, in part, also motivated economically by the fact that the two media were in competition for roughly the same audiences. Thus, throughout its history, ontological speculation about the essential differences between film and TV has had a certain pragmatic urgency. In this essay, I intend to review some of the leading proposals concerning the putative ontological differences between TV and film. I will then go

Fictive Spaces for Monastic Places Art and Architecture in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Fictive Spaces for Monastic Places Art and Architecture in Fifteenth-Century Florence CHARLES R. MACK In a provocative essay in the Millennium issue of the Journal of the Society ofArchitectural Historians, Alina Payne lamented the "sad but inescapable truth that...academic disciplines have been drifting apart, carried along by the energy of their increased specialization ."1 Payne explored the widening breach between the histories ofart and architecture, evidence ofwhich, one might add, is to be found in the separate meetings and journals of the organizations dedicated either to the history of art or to the history of architecture. Payne noted, however, that the current disciplinary and philosophical separation between art and architecture had not always existed, for "a traditional sister art to painting and sculpture, architecture was officially associated with them from the time of the founding of the Accademia del disegno (1563) and was therefore also a component ofart history as presented by Giorgio Vasari in his inaugural le Vite...."2 Our understanding of the course of painting and architecture in Italy during the Renaissance is often impaired by the artificial lines we now draw between the arts. Disciplinary specialization frequently obscures our vision and prevents our seeing the projects of Renaissance artists in the homogeneous fashion in which they were originally presented. This article is dedicated toJohn W. Dixon, Jr., Professor Emeritus of both the Departments of Religion and of Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In his own work as an art historian and as a scholar of religious studies, Dr. Dixon's inspired teaching and thoughtful publications exemplify the fusion ofreligion and art addressed within the present essay. The material included here was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southeast Chapter of the Society ofArchitectural Historians held in Lexington, Virginia, in October 2000. I would like to thank two anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions in preparing the final version of the article . 30 ARRis While it is true that in the Renaissance painters belonged to one craft guild and sculptors and builders to another, the distinctions were often blurred.3 In practice , the materials used determined occupational alignments , not what was done with them. vVhen, for instance, the Florentines appointed an architect for their great Cathedral project they found the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio the most suitable candidate and, for his successors , chose the painter Giotto, the goldsmith Brunelleschi, and the sculptor Bernardo Rossellino.4 Florentine patrons regarded them as the best practitioners of the arts available and chose them to direct this, the major project of the Florentine commune, regardless of their specific expertise. Art and architecture were parts of a whole and it was expected that a master could function (at least as supervisor) across the disciplines. Renaissance builders and painters frequently fused their talents as complements, using architectural settings and painted illusions to heighten the visual response. Several cloister yards of fifteenth-century Florence exhibit this amalgam of architecture and art strikingly.-5 Monastic cloister yards provided the setting for a whole category of Renaissance paintings whose effect was site specific and very spatial in impact. The idea of the cloister, itself, was particularly significant in Christian religious life. In the dark days of the early Church, the days of Roman persecution, the Christian author, Tertullian, wrote of the prisons in which his fellow believers awaited martyrdom: The prison now offers to the Christian what the desert once gave to the Prophets....Let us drop the name 'prison' and call it a place of seclusion. Though the body is confined, though the flesh is detained, there is nothing that is not open to the spirit. In spirit wander about, in spirit take a walk, setting before your- selves not shady promenades and long porticoes but that path which leads to God.6 To the imprisoned Christian martyrs-to-be, Tertullian's evocations of "shady promenades" and "long porticoes" were reminders of philosophic academies. Yet such earthly settings, whether prison or academy were but physical waystations to the spiritual destination. Even with the triumph of Christianity, the idea of the physical, yet spiritually liberating, incarceration of the believer persisted, to be eventually reflected in the institutionalized concept of...

Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne

This essay examines Gian Lorenzo Bernini's famous statue of Apollo and Daphne in light of a tradition of poetics and art theory in which vision and touch play central roles. The interaction between these senses is explicitly figured in Bernini's statue, which deploys all the marvels of the sculptor's craft in the representation of the god of poetry, a sister art. The statue, created at a time when the role of the senses in both poetry and art was being scrutinized, emblematizes the poetics of Bernini's own sculptural enterprise, which was, at this moment, undergoing its own momentous metamorphosis.

THE SUBLIME RIVALRY OF WORD AND IMAGE: TURNER AND RUSKIN REVISITED

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate, symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery; greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art.—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as ArtistWHILE MUCH ATTENTION has been lavished upon the positive and ultimately profitable relationship between Ruskin and Turner, the closeness of their association has served to obscure a more subtle dynamic between the author and the painter in their respective quests for expression. Both Turner, who considered himself a poet as well as a painter, and Ruskin, an accomplished draughtsman who illustrated his own writings, were actively involved in forging new connections between word and image, and in breaking down the barriers between genres embraced by earlier generations. Turner and Ruskin each turned to the sister art both for inspiration, and importantly, for a means of supplementing what each perceived to be the insufficiencies of his own medium. For Turner, painting’s concrete, mimetic nature was at odds with his desire to communicate abstract ideas, while for Ruskin, language’s abstract and conventional nature fell short of our visual experience of the world and failed adequately to address our visual powers of thought, memory, and imagination. Yet as Turner tried to infuse his painting with poetry and Ruskin tried to render his prose visual, they nonetheless remained acutely aware of the gap between words and images. And if Turner and Ruskin readily acknowledged their intergeneric borrowings from the sister arts, implicit within their formulations of “poetic painting” and “painterly prose” is the subtext of the paragone, an age old rivalry between painters and poets for representational or expressive superiority.

New Essays on Samuel Richardson, and: The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson, and: Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in "Clarissa", and: Samuel Richardson's New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and "Native" Virtue (review)

Reviewed by: New Essays on Samuel Richardson, and: The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson, and: Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in “Clarissa”, and: Samuel Richardson’s New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and “Native” Virtue Janine Barchas Rivero, Albert J., ed. New Essays on Samuel Richardson. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Pp. 232. $26.00 cloth. Fysh, Stephanie. The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson. (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1997). Pp. 156. $29.50 cloth. Frega, Donnalee. Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in “Clarissa.” (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). Pp. 177. $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Chung, Ewha. Samuel Richardson’s New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and “Native” Virtue. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998). Pp. 162. $36.95 cloth. Two common factors unite these diverse books on Samuel Richardson: their expansion of the traditional Richardsonian canon and their lack of engagement with the field’s formerly dominant critical methodologies. Indeed, these two factors may be related, in that the receding tide of Marxist and Deconstructionist theory may be revealing new contours in the landscape of Richardson studies. Three of the four books explore beyond Pamela and Clarissa: they devote significant attention to Richardson’s lesser-known Grandison and to his private correspondence, dare repeatedly to venture into the relatively uncharted realms of Pamela II and The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, and even consider the significance of physical Richardsoniana such as waxworks, fans, and paintings. [End Page 471] New Essays on Samuel Richardson, edited by Albert J. Rivero, represents the best of the new perspective. It is a deep vein of outstanding scholarship which should be mined by anybody with an interest in Richardson. The absence of overarching theoretical frameworks in these essays (Jocelyn Harris’ invocation of theories of the carnivalesque is an exception) places a premium upon precise analysis and argument, and it is a premium that these essays deliver. It also encourages the contributors to look at Richardson from new angles. Three essays present Richardson in a guise other than printer-novelist: Peter Sabor gives an account of the autobiographical revelations and inventions in the correspondence with Johannes Stinstra; Kevin L. Cope probes and problematizes Richardson as an aphorist; and Howard D. Weinbrot positions Richardson as a satirist by investigating the portrait of Elias Brand. In complimenting studies of literary influence, Florian Stuber asserts that Richardson, like Fielding, draws upon Cervantes in his Pamela II, while Joseph F. Bartolomeo reveals how Clarissa, in turn, influences Lennox’s The Female Quixote. Two essays concern Richardson’s mentoring of young female writers: Tom Keymer chronicles the author’s relationship with Jane Collier while John A. Dussinger speculates about Richardson’s contributions to a novel by Anna Meades. A final pair of essays reflect on closure in Grandison: Lois A. Chaber draws eloquently upon the sister arts of landscape and music in her discussion of the novel’s subversive ending, while Rivero posits Clementina’s ultimate association with “unnatural” romance. The volume also highlights what has emerged as a key critical tension in mainstream Richardson studies—the reading of sex and gender issues that animate the novels. John Allen Stevenson and Jocelyn Harris, for example, both focus on the ghastly carcass of Mrs. Sinclair in their discussions of physicality (90, 102). But while Stevenson deploys Sinclair’s death to illustrate a gnostic rejection of sex and the body that unites Lovelace and Clarissa, Harris connects the Sinclair passage to classical and modern literary templates for pornographic sexuality. Similarly, Jerry C. Beasley and Michael F. Suarez illustrate the critical debate over feminism in Richardson. On the one had, anyone who would argue the proto-feminism of Richardson will have to address Beasley’s claims that the author robs his heroines of their radicalism by reintegrating them into patriarchy through marriage (albeit as Christ’s bride in Clarissa). On the other hand, Suarez’s contrary reading of Clarissa asserts that the heroine’s assertion of negative power—“nay-saying” and, ultimately, death—allows her a form of feminist triumph over the “patterns of infantilization” in the novel (69). It is at such points...

Ceci n'est pas un discours sur le jardin anglais

The article argues that the landscape garden was a powerful epistemological model in so far as it produced a non-discursive paradigm. It studies several mo des of combination of 'Sister Arts' - e.g. architecture in the landscape, or pictorial analogues - to show that their intended appeal rests on the simultaneous perception of differences between artistic modes, in complex harmonies of perception and imagination. It gives formal analyses of motifs such as the Palladian Bridge to show how their function was to manifest the irreducible multiplicity of styles and aesthetic experiences.

"Paintings Like Prayers": The Hidden Side of Senegalese Reverse-Glass "Image/Texts"

Establishing links between African literatures and African arts is both a straightforward and a complex process. In an intellectual age when cultural expressions are presumed to have "texts," it may seem obvious to Western observers that the commonalities of African literatures and arts must outweigh the differences. What W. J. T. Mitchell calls "the imbrication of visual and verbal experience" (83) makes it questionable--and undoubtedly arbitrary--to separate the two as completely as people in the West often have, because of the oddities of their own intellectual and academic histories; and a number of engaging interdisciplinary approaches to the "Sister Arts" have been developed to reveal "structural homologies between texts and images" (84). Yet as Mitchell further asserts, such work may lead to the proposal of facile "master narratives" for literature and visual arts that stifle appreciation of "other forms of relationship [between them], eliminating the possibility of metonymic juxtapositions, of incommensurability, and of unmediated or non-negotiable forms of alterity" (87). Mitchell's caveats are especially pertinent when considering the narrativities and visualities of non-Western cultures (see Nelson forthcoming).

Lecture d'un jardin anglais : Stowe (Buckinghamshire)

The garden of Stowe can be "read" at three different levels. As a book reflecting contemporary debates on aesthetics, it shows the evolution of taste from geometrical shapes and a domesticated nature influenced by foreign art - Italian, Dutch and French styles - to a more natural landscape, more congenial to the English love for liberty. Such were the remarkable achievements of Bridgeman, William Kent, and Lancelot Brown. Stowe also reads as a book of emblems, a political satire and a moral creed, an echo of Lord Cobham's conflicts with the government of Walpole. Compared with the beautiful temples dedicated to Ancient Virtue and to the British Worthies, Modern Vitue is a mere ruin. The whig ideal of liberty and the cult of Saxon ancestors are everywhere written in the stones of Stowe. Such is the message of this "incredibly learned and witty garden" (John Dixon Hunt) to the privileged elite possessing the keys to that emblematic language. But visitors to Stowe can also enjoy a solitary walk in the alleys and groves, along the brooks and lakes, their senses delighted by the sights, smells and sounds of the place, their imagination full of reminiscences of pictures and poems which have also inspired the creators of that "fair paradise" (James Thomson): a perfect illustration of the harmonious interaction of the Sister Arts, so highly praised by Ancients and Moderns alike.

Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (review)

264 Reviews a very useful guide to readers finding their w a y between the present contributions and pursuing issues raised and approaches to the material further. There is m u c h to be gained from a concerted effort of reading through the collection in its entirety. The essays are short and eminently readable, and, especially w h e n taken as a whole, contribute, in many significant ways, to the current discourse on w o m e n and the Middle Ages. Margaret Rogerson Department ofEnglish University of Sydney Russell, J . Stephen, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbu Tales, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1998; cloth; pp. x, 265 R.R.P. US$49.95. This lively study of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales covers the General Pr the Knight's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale and the Clerk's Tale in detail a in its conclusion, deals briefly with the characterisation of the Wife of Bath and the Merchant, and also with the Tale ofMelibee and the Franklin's Tal It is aimed primarily at students (who are characterised as 'workers', those w h o try to connect with others) of Chaucer and Middle English literature but is also directed to those w h o are concerned with 'medieval ideas about the mind, language, expression and identity' (p. ix). It is eminently readable, with a clear and sometimes colloquial style, and frequently uses twentieth-century analogies to clarify complex points. It situates itself not as a definitive or exhaustive discussion of its topic, but as an invitation and stimulus to further work in the area. Its major title gives a clear indication of its subject-matter; a discussion of Chaucer's work in relation to the curriculum of the trivium. Its subtitle makes clear its focus on the Canterbury Tales and introduces the key term 'mindsong' which, like 'worker', is a term expressing connection. A s Professor Russell explains, 'mindsong' encapsulates the truth, acknowledged by medieval thinkers as well as by modern ones, that 'we never actually connect with each other at all, that w e can never do better than to share words and ideas imperfectly, inexactly', and that 265 'our words try to connect' but are never more than 'a performance that i s both by us and about us' (p. ix). In a short introductory chapter which sets out to reassure medievalists of the validity of their enterprise, Russell positions his work as a negotiation between the 'presumptions of the old historicism and the despair of the New', arguing that, while 'a measure of humility in the face of the past' m a y be a positive challenge to scholars, it can be so only if it frees itself from the enervating constraints of scepticism and is energised by 'palpable passion, curiosity, and boldness, at least to explore and hypothesize' (p. 2). Certainly, there is humility in this book and a deep passion that sustains its carefully elucidated thesis. Russell argues that the trivium was a formative influence on the Canterbury Tales and that an understanding of the 'trivial' curriculum (especially of the sister arts of grammar and logic, the bases of medieval understandings of the cognitive processes) leads not only to a validation of truths already intuitively held about the text, but also to new ways of knowing both the characters w h o populate i t and the tales they tell. Before embarking on his detailed analyses of the General Prologue and selected tales, Russell presents a 'litel tretys' on medieval education, its values and priorities (p. 5). This 'tretys' (pp. 6-53) offers a clear and cogent exploration of the various branches of the trivium, the basis of language framing in the medieval period. Russell is cautious about our ability to know precisely what Chaucer's education was, but is prepared to claim that, if it is assumed that he would have been exposed to the languagebased trivium subjects, then it m a y equally be assumed that he would have shared the understanding that language is a fallible medium of expression. He further suggests that, along with other medieval artists and thinkers Chaucer would have seen...

Walt Whitman and the Sister Arts

Examines Whitman's attitude toward the visual arts and toward contemporary and historical beliefs about the relation between poetry and painting, focusing especially upon Whitman's relation to art patron William Cullen Bryant and sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, and upon how Whitman "boldly reconfigured the transgenre appeal of the sister arts."

Tom Jones on the Telly: Fielding, the BBC, and the Sister Arts

Tom Jones on the Telly: Fielding, the BBC, and the Sister Arts

So rich a tapestry: the sister arts and cultural studies

So rich a tapestry: the sister arts and cultural studies