Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

Sophia Andres is Professor of English and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She is the author of The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries (winner of the 2006 SCMLA Book Award). Brian Donnelly is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Painter as Poet (2015).

Plates – Notes on Contributors – Acknowledgments – Sophia Andres/Brian Donnelly: Pre-Raphaelite Poetic Paintings: Transcending Spatial and Temporal Boundaries – Serena Trowbridge: Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of "The Eve of St Agnes" – Divya Athmanathan: "Good pictures … are always another poem": Mapping Spatialities in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s "The Lady of Shalott" and Elizabeth Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott – Dante Alighieri’s Dreams in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Paintings – Laurence Roussillon-Constanty: "A Dramatis Personae of the Soul": Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine – Martina John: " Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti’s Dante – Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems in Paintings: Photography, Realism and Painting – Enrique Olivares: Interpretation and Representation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s "Sonnets for Pictures" – Daniel Brown: "They that would look on her": Jane Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and "The Portrait" – Modernity’s Kaleidoscopic Views – Amelia Yeates: Poetic Narrative in William Morris’s and Edward Burne- Jones’s Pygmalion Project – Sarah Banschbach Valles: Aestheticism and Violent Delight in the Sister Arts of A. C. Swinburne and Simeon Solomon – Anne Koval: From Poet to Painter: The Aestheticism of Swinburne and Whistler – Sophia Andres: Conclusion: Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of Classical Texts – Bibliography – Index.

“This thought-provoking collection of essays explores the intersection of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry and reimagines a poetics of the visual. By destabilizing the categories of verbal and visual representation and bringing together familiar and unfamiliar poems and paintings, the authors model new and exciting ways of thinking about gender, musicality, photography, the temporal-spatial divide, the use of the voice, morality, sexuality, social implications, and aestheticism as they are conveyed through word and image by the Pre-Raphaelites.”
Constance M. Fulmer, Blanche E. Seaver Chair of English Literature, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California

“These essays provide rich, multi-layered portals into the hearts and minds of Pre- Raphaelite artists, while disrupting conventional interpretations of space, identity and gender. They advance nuanced discourse across disciplines, outlining the integration between poetry of the period, Pre-Raphaelite poetry in particular, and the visual art produced through that integration. «Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings» is not only important for ongoing academic research on the subjects, but it is unique for the ways it can prompt practicing arts professionals (including museums), to engage viewers in a total phenomenological and sensory experience in front of the physical work of art. The essays challenge us to consider gender and identity politics in the interior and exterior spaces of mind and canvas, while contemplating the lush brushstrokes and written lines of these memorable Victorian masterpieces.”
Rita R. Wright, Director, Springville Museum

“This international collection not only reconsiders how painting and poetry enrich each other, but also extends the nature of ekphrasis itself beyond its traditional boundaries, as a method of expressing gendered spatial relations, as an extension of the artist’s own self, as a mode capable equally of releasing a subject into view as it is of representing an object. Of particular note are the essays enabling us to see how the sister-arts reveal what is interior, reminding us that a poem is as much introspection as it is a visual event. It is a collection in which an artist’s experiments are reframed as stylistic innovations, biographical interpretation is replaced with arguments about intertextual framework, and the voiceless receive both faces and voices. Reading these essays produces, as one author suggests, a ‘violent delight,’ asking us to consider what questions we have not been asking and which we need to ask now.”
Bryn Gribben, Seattle University