The Poetics of Description : Imagined Places in European Literature

This book tells a remarkable story that begins in classical antiquity with ecphrasis, the art of describing the world so vividly that the audience could become imaginative eyewitnesses, and the events that caused an ideal of immediacy to be transformed into nearly its opposite, a preoccupation with representation of representation. The Poetics of Description tells a remarkable story that begins in classical antiquity with ecphrasis, the art of describing the world so vividly that the audience could become imaginative eyewitnesses. The story continues with the European writers from Milton to Lord Byron who inherited this tradition and used it to describe places, both natural and man-made, to serve as figures for mind, memory, and creative perception. It comes to a surprising conclusion when, in the middle of the twentieth century, one prominent scholar?s misunderstanding limited ecphrasis to descriptions of works of art, and what had begun as an ideal of immediacy was transformed into nearly its opposite, a preoccupation with representation of representation Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction: Ecphrasis, Description, and the Imagined Place....Pages 1-17 As If Present: Classical Ecphrasis....Pages 19-42 Unity, Form, and Figuration....Pages 43-68 A Sylvan Scene....Pages 69-95 The Universe Dead or Alive: Gilpin, Wordsworth, and the Picturesque....Pages 97-123 The Visionary Eye: Wordsworth’s Antipicturesque Excursion....Pages 125-154 “Till the Place Became Religion”: Byron’s Coliseum....Pages 155-187 Epilogue: Immediacy....Pages 189-197 Back Matter....Pages 199-232