Verbal Visuality

Throughout literary history, the visual arts have remained a popular subject for writers and, particularly since the end of the 20th century, intermedial narratives that unite word and image in manifold ways enjoy yet increasing popularity. Verbal Visuality - The Visual Arts in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction discusses the forms and functions of art in contemporary novels and short stories from a variety of Anglophone regions, texts in which questions of iconography and aesthetics take centre stage. It provides an evaluation of the ways in which art discourses occur as well as what they 'do' for the narrative itself and what they may accomplish beyond the text as such. In all art narratives, the plot and the depiction of individual characters as well as the structure of the texts, for example through the elaborate use of ekphrasis, display a strong connection to the world of the visual: Characters define themselves through art movements or specific works, art objects become a means of consolation, the assessment of individual works is turned into a universal discourse on the role of the arts in general. These texts thus constitute significant formal hybrids that let the reader oscillate between word and image, turning the narratives into artefacts that allow for a large number of negotiations of current socio-political and socio-cultural issues. Verbal Visuality provides an in-depth analysis of these questions and negotiations, grounding them on a variety of contemporary art narratives, among them novels and short stories by Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Patricia Schonstein-Pinnock, Nick Hornby, and Siri Hustvedt.