Overview

«Ut pictura poesis», Horace said, but through the two millennia in which «the sister arts» have been compared, little has been said about the nature of sight itself. What we see in «our mind’s eye» as we read has not been explored, though by following the visual prompts in texts, one can anatomize the process of visualization. The Poetics of Sight analyses the role of sight in memory, dream and popular culture and demonstrates the structure of a complex sight within the metaphors of Shakespeare, Pope and Dickens; and within the visual metaphors of Picasso, Magritte and Bacon. This book explores the difference between the great and the failed works of the supreme poet-painter, William Blake, and tracks the migrations of the Satiric muse between verbal mockery and scabrous images in Persius, Pope, Gillray and Gogol. It records the rise, and partial decline, of the vividly «seen» novel in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust and Hardy. The key concept throughout this book is visual metaphor, which in the twentieth century acquired overarching importance: in art from Picasso to Kapoor, in poetry from Eliot to Hughes, in aesthetics from Pound to Derrida. The book closes with a far-reaching definition of visual metaphor and with the great visual metaphor of the human body.

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9783034307239

Table of Contents

Reviews

I particularly liked Harvey's ability to argue his case in lucid, elegant prose [...] and there's his usual mastery of prose rhythm and the well-turned sentence to express his argument with considered authority. His scholarship is judiciously deployed. [...] I commend this book: it'll change the way you read. (Simon Lavery, Tredynas Days, 1 June 2015)

"""I particularly liked Harvey's ability to argue his case in lucid, elegant prose [...] and there's his usual mastery of prose rhythm and the well-turned sentence to express his argument with considered authority. His scholarship is judiciously deployed. [...] I commend this book: it'll change the way you read."" (Simon Lavery, Tredynas Days, 1 June 2015)"

Author Information

John Harvey is a literary critic and novelist. He is a Doctor of Letters of Cambridge University and a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he has lectured in the English Faculty since 1970. In 2000 he was appointed University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture. He is the author of Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators, Men in Black and The Story of Black.

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