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Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature

1988

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Paperback: Chicago UP, 1991.

Pictures from the Renaissance to modernism freeze narratives in an a-temporal moment. The aim is visual realism, a suspended moment of perception with an “unnatural” clarity and compression of meaning. Those images turn up regularly in literary romances, where, paradoxically, they convey the anti-realism of this genre. An exploration of temporal suspension and narrativity, this book reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and romance literature.