Search Results

Imagining structures from the ekphrastic descriptions of the Jerusalem Temple and Temple Mount in I Kings and Ezekiel is an ancient meditation discipline, which was adopted from Jewish practices into early Christian monasticism. Though it could take various forms, ‘imagining/remembering Jerusalem’ was often practised as a devotional exercise throughout the European Middle Ages. Drawings of such an imagined character are significant to late medieval exegesis of these and related scriptural materials, particularly those associated with the commentaries of Nicholas of Lyra and the collection of visual meditations known as the Speculum theologie. This chapter queries a late medieval illuminated manuscript (Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 156) that, in the fifteenth century, formed part of the library of St John's Hospital in Exeter, to suggest that its materials were acquired and used for scriptural study and sermon composition by scholars of the hospital and its associated school.

This chapter discusses the taxonomy of imaginary literary works (supplementing the taxonomy of fictionalized life‐writings proposed in Chapter 5), and their scarcity during the nineteenth century. It concludes the discussion of Joyce, and ends with an account of Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as an indisputable example of a fictionally authored auto/biography.

This chapter explores the Cappadocians’ deployment of ekphrasis as it appears in panegyrics to the martyrs and in other letters connected in some way to the cult of the martyrs. The analysis of Gregory of Nyssa’s powerful use of ekphrasis of the artwork in the martyrium of St. Theodore of Euchaïta shows how astutely he prepares the faithful for physical and spiritual redirection through ritual acts at the martyr shrine. The second part links the role of ekphrasis to the two structures built by the Cappadocians: the church built by Gregory of Nazianzus’ father, and the martyrium built by Gregory of Nyssa. Finally, the chapter compares and contrasts Nyssen’s martyrium with the archeological reconstruction of St. Philip’s martyrium in Hierapolis, built in the late-fourth century, thus providing a tangible entrance into the vibrant network of Cappadocian martyria, no longer extant.

The Panic of 1837 was the financial crisis that set the pattern for such paroxysms of instability in the financial system ever since. This chapter explores the importance of the figure of the bank in the years that followed the Panic, particularly as it was deployed in works of fiction by Harriet Martineau, Robert Morris, and Edgar Allan Poe. Such works share a key rhetorical feature with the writings of economists in that they deploy the figure known as ekphrasis, the “speaking picture,” invoking images to mark the place where narration fails to convey the full complexity of their text’s meaning. The chapter ends with a reading of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” as incorporating a screen memory of the labor and violence that subtended the global economic system.

The chapter addresses the primary aspects of the ekphrasis of photographs. Using Mikhail Bahktin’s theory of the chronotope of the novel, the chapter defines what it terms “the chronotope of the photograph”, describing this as a narrative space that occurs between a photographic image and a poetic speaker. The primary example is taken from Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Brief History of Photography”.

In everyday conversation, speakers and hearers inhabit specific places and times. Languages include deictic terms to refer to these givens of the physical situation. Speakers can choose to refer explicitly to their immediate location and moment, and in fact politicians typically do, even to the point of arranging to give a speech in a location that they can strategically reference. Though written texts seem to transcend the particulars of time and place, writers in some circumstances can use immediate deixis. But more often writers, and even speakers, can construct absent or hypothetical places and times through imaginary deixis. The result is the set description, recommended in rhetorical exercises since antiquity (as descriptio, ekphrasis, etc.). Time and place can also be invoked in broader senses. For example, the time referenced or constructed in an argument can ignore a particular hour or date and focus instead on time in the sense of an occasion, a kairotic moment that the arguer seizes on, such as an anniversary or a “first time.” Campbell in the eighteenth and Chilton in the twenty-first century note the argumentative potential in constructions of time and place, and Bitzer labeled these aspects of the rhetorical situation, calling special attention to the exigence, the immediate need for rhetorical discourse. To Burke, time and place were elements of the arguer's scene whose circumference was malleable. The number of critical terms in rhetoric covering notions of time and place shows the importance of this dimension of speaker/audience interaction.

This chapter argues that Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, typically framed as the first global epic, operates instead within the cartographic framework of the late fifteenth century (contemporaneous with Vasco da Gama). Camões’s poem describes the Indian Ocean as a transposition of the Mediterranean Sea: both were imagined, in different poetic and cartographic traditions (ranging from Ptolemy to Islamic cartography), as enclosed oceans. In Os Lusíadas, then, Camões paints his protagonist Vasco da Gama as a new Hercules, who masterfully opens up the Indian Ocean by passing the Cape of Good Hope (in the shape of Adamastor’s monstrous rock), just as Hercules had opened up the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean (according to ancient geographic traditions). By modeling the Indian Ocean after the Mediterranean Sea, Os Lusíadas proudly exports the idea of an autonomous and hegemonic Europe across the continents, thereby conflating globalization and Europeanization.

Ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual art – has traditionally been regarded as a form of paragone or competition between different forms of representation. The Introduction advocates a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between word and image. It outlines the ways in which the paragone has dominated critical conceptions of intermedial relationships. Ekphrastic works of various periods and styles have been read through the paradigm of the paragone that was established in the Renaissance; and yet this was not the only model available during that period. It is argued that the agonistic model was the primary means of conceptualising ekphrasis during the first ‘ekphrastic turn’ of the 1990s, and that this model has continued to be influential into the twenty-first century. However recent critics and theorists working across various disciplines and periods have started to interrogate this influential paradigm.

In his 1594 narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis to explore a shift in the early modern understanding of history. Of the many changes he made to the Lucrece story, he added a 200-line ekphrasis of a picture depicting the fall of Troy. While appearing at first glance to celebrate the idea of an illusionistic experience that makes the past seem fully alive, Shakespeare’s ekphrasis draws our attention to the fragmented things that supposedly evoke this fantasy – the ‘thousand lamentable objects’. In so doing, Shakespeare explores a new notion of history that is built from material fragments. These fragments are silent, but in a manner that is paradoxically expressive. In Shakespeare’s ekphrasis, Lucrece relates to the image of Hecuba not despite its brokenness and objectness, but rather because of them. The poem in this way constructs an early modern encounter where broken subject meets broken object.

This chapter examines the figure of ekphrasis in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and focuses on the so-called ‘Painter scene’ that appears in the 1602 quarto. This is the most obviously ekphrastic moment in the play, in which its protagonist, Hieronimo, encounters a Painter and commissions a visual artwork based on his plight. Critics of the play have tended to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as paragone, and argue that the representational contest implicit in this scene ultimately demonstrates the superiority of drama. By contrast, this chapter seeks to question the paragonal model of ekphrasis, and argues that The Spanish Tragedy highlights drama’s interdependence with, rather than superiority to, other forms of representation. The chapter also suggests that the play’s interest in ekphrasis opens up larger questions about borrowing, imitation, and collaboration. The Spanish Tragedy highlights the illusionistic aspects of theatrical representation, and its reliance upon a cunning juxtaposition of various forms of ‘counterfeit’ art.

Andrew Marvell is becoming increasingly recognised as a poet who demonstrates a profound connection with the full range of visual arts. However, little attention has been paid to how the remarkable visual quality of Marvell’s work engages with traditional or contemporary debates about ekphrasis. This may seem surprising, as poems like ‘The Gallery’ tempt us into the sort of paragonal opposition between text and image that has become a central characteristic of ekphrastic critical orthodoxy. But Marvell’s work is well-suited to revisionist debates that look beyond these binary divisions. Two barely known Latin poems that accompany an unusual portrait of Oliver Cromwell to the Queen of Sweden demonstrate ekphrasis as prosopopoeia, exposing boundaries of language and culture in both visual and verbal modes. When Marvell’s fascination with how lives are represented combines with glass and reflection, we embark upon his ekphrastic encounter: of specific visual and temporal moments that define human mortality.

This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasise Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.