Images ‘in the air’ in George Moore’s Lewis Seymour and Some Women and Modern Painting
This paper aims to examine the relationships between text and image in George Moore’s fiction and art criticism. After his failure to become a painter in Paris, Moore started to write novels in the 1880s. It is obvious that his experience in Parisian art studios had an influence on his writing and t...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2016-11-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/cve/3017 |
| Summary: | This paper aims to examine the relationships between text and image in George Moore’s fiction and art criticism. After his failure to become a painter in Paris, Moore started to write novels in the 1880s. It is obvious that his experience in Parisian art studios had an influence on his writing and that he remained fascinated by this art form. This study explores the numerous references to painting in the novel Lewis Seymour and Some Women and the various modes in which intermediality is expressed. The names of painters and the debates on art reveal the anxiety of influence that burdens creation, while the focus on the work of the protagonist who is a painter generates a reflection on the birth of images and their emergence both on canvas and in text where they appear as ‘images in the air’. Moore also emphasizes the central function of ekphrasis and the complex connections between painting and literature: the texts referred to in the novel are used as ekphrastic presentations of virtual pictures that are never completed. Images can then be regarded as pretexts (and even pre-texts). Moore’s use of ekphrasis in Modern Painting is associated with the dissemination of meaning and the deconstruction of realism. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |