KOELB, Janice Hewlett,
Poetics of Descriptions. Imagined Places in European Literature,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
ISBN : 1403974896 — 256 p.
Compte rendu dans Acta fabula:
L’ekphrasis comme description de lieux : de l’antiquité aux romantiques anglais, par Christof Schöch.
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.
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Contents :
Introduction: Ecphrasis, Description, and the Imagined Place
"As If Present": Classical Ecphrasis
Unity, Form, and Figuration
A Sylvan Scene
The Universe Dead or Alive: Gilpin, Wordsworth, and the Picturesque
The Visionary Eye: Wordsworth’s Anti-picturesque Excursion
"Till the Place Became Religion": Byron’s Coliseum
Epilogue: Immediacy
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About the Author :
JANICE HEWLETT KOELB received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA, where she specialized in classical Latin and British Romantic literature. Today she is an independent scholar in Chapel Hill.