World, image, text: studies in literary and visual culture

This collection of essays on the conceptualisation and representation of nature and time and their interrelationship in literature and the visual arts is written by scholars both from western academia and India, scholars who are established experts in their field as well as young critics making an early foray in the world of scholarly research. In addition, there is an essay by a practising artist meditating on nature and time through self-portraits. The contributors come from a wide variety of locations: India, Australia, Norway, Spain and the United States of America. The scope of the book is large: it encompasses not only the literature and art of Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, it also includes an examination of the art and literature of the Indian sub-continent. The verbal and visual genres examined are manifold: epyllion, comedy, epic, satire, childrens fiction, travelogue, painting, sculpture, frontispiece, engraving, miniature, book illustration, cartoon, photograph. This book is a bold attempt to break down the isolation of the two disciplines, literature and the visual arts, and to make parallelism an exploratory method aimed at a mutually enriching synthesis. Since ideas and tendencies acquire an irreducibly concrete life in artistic representation, examination of the same life in two different art forms deepens our understanding of it as well as of the larger issues and contexts in which the literary and visual texts are embedded. While this is a collection of scholarly essays, there is enough here to interest the lay reader. A conscious effort has been made to eschew jargon and to make the style as clear and accessible as possible without in any way diluting the content. The addition of a number of valuable full-colour plates accessed from museums as diverse as the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; the Vatican Pinacotheca and the Victoria and Albert Museum will add to the readers pleasure.