Bøker i Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts-serien

The figure of the beautiful reclining female sleeper is a recurring theme in the Victorian imagination. This book compiles and examines a corpus of Sleeping Beauties drawn from Victorian medical reports, literature and the arts and explores the significance of the enduring revival of the myth.

This book examines the role and the meaning of collecting in the fiction of Henry James. Emerging as a refined consumerist practice at the end of the nineteenth century, collecting not only set new rules for appreciating art, but also helped to shape the aesthetic tenets of major literary movements such as naturalism and aestheticism. Although he befriended some of the greatest collectors of the age, in his narrative works James maintained a sceptical, if not openly critical, position towards collecting and its effects on appreciation. Likewise, he became increasingly reluctant to follow the fashionable trend of classifying and displaying art objects in the literary text, resorting to more complex forms of representation. Drawing from classic and contemporary aesthetics, as well as from sociology and material culture, this book fills a gap in Jamesian criticism, explaining how and why James's aversion towards collecting was central to the development of his fiction from the beginning of his career to the so-called major phase.

This book examines the many facets of the work of Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001). Klossowski first established himself as a writer and was known and admired by peers such as Bataille, Blanchot, Gide, Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan. But in 1972 he gave up writing to devote himself to his 'mutism': painting made up of large coloured drawings. In time he became as famous a painter as he had been a writer and theorist. Klossowski now has two separate groups of commentators: those concerned with his writings and those with his painting, with little overlap between the two. Here, this separation is explicitly removed. Klossowski's entire A uvre revolved around the concept of the gaze. Rarely has the gaze been so radically interpreted - as an active, mobile, evanescent object that breaks down the connections between representation and the visible. How is one to see the invisible divinity? This question plagued Klossowski, and he displaced it onto pornographic rituals. The pantomime of spirits is the scene, fixed in silence, where bodies meet - a knotting of desiring body and dogmatic theology. A creator of simulacra, Klossowski attempted to exorcise the 'obsessive constraint of the phantasm' that subjugated him in all these scenes. Translated from the French by Adrian Price in collaboration with Pamela King.

This book offers an interpretative key to Virginia Woolf's visual and spatial strategies by investigating their nature, role and function. The author examines long-debated theoretical and critical issues with their philosophical implications, as well as Woolf's commitment to contemporary aesthetic theories and practices. The analytical core of the book is introduced by a historical survey of the interart relationship and significant critical theories, with a focus on the context of Modernism. The author makes use of three investigative tools: descriptive visuality, the widely debated notion of spatial form, and cognitive visuality. The cognitive and remedial value of Woolf's visual and spatial strategies is demonstrated through an inter-textual analysis of To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts (with cross-references to Woolf's short stories and Jacob's Room). The development of Woolf's literary output is read in the light of a quest for unity, a formal attempt to restore parts to wholeness and to rescue Being from Nothingness.

Aims to explain why claims about the autonomy and interrelatedness of the arts, expressed in the form of a provocative monthly journal, proved so influential as to be a source of inspiration for the "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine", "The Century Guild Hobby Horse", "The Yellow Book", "The Savoy", and even for Modernist periodicals.

This essay collection explores the relationship between spirituality and art, the result of an interdisciplinary conference on the topic including artists, clergy, theologians and art historians. This collection seeks to clarify what is meant by spiritual art, or indeed, what it means to describe an artwork as being spiritual.

This new study traces the development and evolution of the writings of Roger Fry (1866-1934), a highly influential art critic who introduced modern French painting to Britain in the early twentieth century. The author examines the role that emerging psychological theories played in the formulation and expression of Fry's aesthetic theories.