Art of the everyday : Dutch painting and the realist novel / Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
2008
PR878.A74 Y43 2008 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
Items
Details
Title
Art of the everyday : Dutch painting and the realist novel / Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
Author
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard.
ISBN
9780691127262 (alk. paper)
0691127263 (alk. paper)
0691127263 (alk. paper)
Imprint
Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2008.
Language
English
Description
xx, 252 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm.
Call Number
PR878.A74 Y43 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification
823/.809357
Summary
"Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday - pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism?" "In this book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values." "After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists - Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust - who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life." "Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art."--Jacket.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Linked Resources
Table of contents only
Record Appears in
On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
All Resources
Table of Contents
The novel as Dutch painting
Low genre and high theory
Balzac's bourgeois interiors and the quest for the absolute
George Eliot's defense of Dutch painting
Hardy's rural painting of the Dutch school
Proust's genre painting and the rediscovery of Vermeer.
Low genre and high theory
Balzac's bourgeois interiors and the quest for the absolute
George Eliot's defense of Dutch painting
Hardy's rural painting of the Dutch school
Proust's genre painting and the rediscovery of Vermeer.