Artistic relations

In this innovative volume, eighteen leading literary critics and art historians explore the relationship between literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century France. Analysing contemporary forms of representation from a range of perspectives, they reveal the rich variety of factors that link image and text.

Nineteenth-century France offers a particularly fertile range of connexions between verbal and visual practice. From imaginative writers engaging in art-criticism to transpositions d'art between paintings and texts, there is a diversity of intersection which goes well beyond mere affinity or analogy.

The volume also clearly acknowledges the importance of setting the relationship between writers and painters against the social fabric of the period: from the economic and institutional structures of artistic production in which they worked, to the wider pictorial culture - including photography and printing - of the century.

The book owes its origins to the rapid growth of interest in the inter-disciplinary field of cultural studies, and seeks to provide an authoritative but accessible text for students and teachers. It is organised into thematic sub-sections within which different kinds of problems are examined and challenging methodological examples presented.

While contributions have been specially commissioned to provide an overview of the field, the stimulating individual views of their authors make them comprehensible and attractive to non-specialists. The book will take its place as the first major work of synthesis on nineteenth-century French literature and art.