Overview

Since Plato's Republic, mimesis - the artwork's tacit claim to reflect or imitate real life - has faced a near-constant stream of assaults, being accused of naturalising a supposedly uncomplicated relationship between world and fiction. Lines of Mimesis offers a revisionary account of mimesis. Specifically, it proposes a rethinking of the representational attitudes of two literary schools usually understood to be at odds with one another - Romanticism and Realism - through close readings of writings and drawings made by two figures usually taken to be proponents of those schools respectively: E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honor de Balzac. Across these readings, Dickson argues that a more capacious understanding of mimesis is achieved when we understand it to pertain not to the reduplication of objects in the world, but to a negotiation of the subject's sensory entwinement with those objects. This new understanding can, in turn, more closely illuminate an artwork's own reflections on its relationship to the world, shedding light on the entanglements and crossovers between Romanticism and Realism.

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9781399506502

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I know of nothing quite like this bold, innovative and endlessly intriguing way of juxtaposing a range of binaries: concepts, movements and authors. This is a book not to miss. --Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge Mimesis constitutes realism, fantasy Romanticism? Polly Dickson examines how algorhythmically entwined and logically unstable mimesis and fantasy actually are. This lucid and erudite investigation of writers from Plato to Wilde discloses a new Hoffmann and a new Balzac, a new Romanticism and a new realism. --Nicholas Saul, Durham University

Author Information

Polly Dickson is Assistant Professor in German at Durham University. She works primarily on nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures, with particular interests in realism and in authors' doodles.

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