Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

“This thought-provoking collection of essays explores the intersection of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry and reimagines a poetics of the visual. By destabilizing the categories of verbal and visual representation and bringing together familiar and unfamiliar poems and paintings, the authors model new and exciting ways of thinking about gender, musicality, photography, the temporal-spatial divide, the use of the voice, morality, sexuality, social implications, and aestheticism as they are conveyed through word and image by the Pre-Raphaelites.” Constance M. Fulmer, Blanche E. Seaver Chair of English Literature, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California
“This international collection not only reconsiders how painting and poetry enrich each other, but also extends the nature of ekphrasis itself beyond its traditional boundaries, as a method of expressing gendered spatial relations, as an extension of the artist’s own self, as a mode capable equally of releasing a subject into view as it is of representing an object. Of particular note are the essays enabling us to see how the sister-arts reveal what is interior, reminding us that a poem is as much introspection as it is a visual event. It is a collection in which an artist’s experiments are reframed as stylistic innovations, biographical interpretation is replaced with arguments about intertextual framework, and the voiceless receive both faces and voices. Reading these essays produces, as one author suggests, a ‘violent delight,’ asking us to consider what questions we have not been asking and which we need to ask now.” Bryn Gribben, Seattle University
“These essays provide rich, multi-layered portals into the hearts and minds of Pre- Raphaelite artists, while disrupting conventional interpretations of space, identity and gender. They advance nuanced discourse across disciplines, outlining the integration between poetry of the period, Pre-Raphaelite poetry in particular, and the visual art produced through that integration. «Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings» is not only important for ongoing academic research on the subjects, but it is unique for the ways it can prompt practicing arts professionals (including museums), to engage viewers in a total phenomenological and sensory experience in front of the physical work of art. The essays challenge us to consider gender and identity politics in the interior and exterior spaces of mind and canvas, while contemplating the lush brushstrokes and written lines of these memorable Victorian masterpieces.” Rita R. Wright, Director, Springville Museum