Photography and Literature in the Twentieth-Century offers an accessible and fresh approach to an object of interdisciplinary research that is currently receiving increased international attention. Providing a broad historical schema, and examining pivotal moments within it, the collection brings together a range of writers and practitioners who help to guide the reader through a historical cross-section of current work in this area. Unlike most existing studies, this volume considers both key literary figures, from Proust to Sebald, and photographic practitioners, from Heartfield to Sekula, in order to give a commanding overview of its subject that is both well-informed and often ground-breaking. With original and accessible essays by acknowledged experts in the field, this is a book that should be of interest not only to students and teachers in departments of literature and photography, but also to those in cultural studies and art history, as well as photographic artists.

This remarkable book traces comprehensively for the first time the give and take between these sister arts by gathering writings about photography and photographs by and of writers from England, Europe, and the United States over the last century and a half.

For over a hundred years stories about photographs and photography have reflected the profound uncertainties and inconclusive endings of the modern world. For many writers, photography, supposedly the most realistic of the arts, turns out to be the most ambiguous. As Jane Rabb observes in her introduction, a number of the stories in this collection involve mysteries, perhaps because photography has a capacity for both documentary reality and moral and psychological ambiguity. Many nineteenth-century writers represented here, including Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, helped make short fiction as respectable as the novel. Some of them were even serious photographers themselves. The twentieth century is arguably a golden age for both the short story and photography. This collection includes examples from a worldly group of writer--Eugène Ionesco, Julio Cortá¡zar, Michel Tournier, and Italo Calvino, as well as the Chinese writer Bing Xin and John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, and Raymond Carver. In this wide range of stories, varying from sentimental to obsessive, to sinister, to tragic and even fatal, the reader will find provocative examples of the confluence of the short story and photography, both once considered the bastard stepchildren of literature and art.

The importance of vision and visual arts such as painting, theatre, and sculpture in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu has long been affirmed; another significant system of visual representation in the novel is photography. Proust appropriated photography as a practice with its own distinctive characteristics which could inform his writing about the processes of perception and memory. Through close textual analysis of scenes where photography is experienced or observed as a practice, and scenes where photography is written into the body of the text, Aine Larkin offers an invigorating new study that sheds genuinely new light on the presence of photographic motifs in Proust's novel, and the subtlety of Proust's engagement with this modern imaging system in his work.

"This anthology investigates books that juxtapose photographs and written language (photo-texts), considering a variety of examples from America, Britain, Canada, and France. Ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to Michael Ondaatje's postmodern novel Coming Through Slaughter and Edward Said's postdocumentary After the Last Sky, the contributors' analyses address photo-textuality's implications for representation and its cultural contexts. A truly interdisciplinary collection, Photo-Textualities features contributors who work in literary studies (English, romance languages), as well as contributors who work in media studies (film, graphic arts)." "Photo-Textualities invigorates critical inquiry with its range of literary and photographic genres, including photo-texts that elude genre classification. Besides documentary and biography, nonfiction literary genres include autobiography and travelogue. The range of photographic genres extends to landscapes, portraiture, documentary, tourist snapshots, and media images, as well as to the standard photo-textual forms of published album and photo-essay."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Photography symbolized the possibility of creating an ideal archive to many Victorians, an archive in which no moment or experience need be forgotten. This seductive idea had particular appeal for a generation of writers preoccupied with their own mortality and the erosion of tradition in an age distracted by the ever-changing spectacle of the present. many early photographers and publishers shared this temporal anxiety and the nostalgic archival proclivities it induced, and these mutual preoccupations resulted in the production of the early photographically illustrated books, verse anthologies, lantern shows, guide books, magazines and cartes de visite collections which are the subject of this book. Groth argues that these various early forms of photlographic illustration reflected and contributed to a growing alignment of reading with taking a moment out of time, and of literary experience with the nostalgic reinventions of an emerging heritage culture. Nostalgia operates both creatively and regressively in this context, providing the catalyst for new cultural forms and memory practices, whilst nurturing an intrinsically conservative desire to find a refuge from the exigencies of the present in an increasingly idealized world of tradition, family, nature, and community; a world where time appeared, for a moment at least, to stand still"--Dust jacket.

European Intertexts is the first fruit of an ongoing collaborative study aiming to challenge the isolationism of much critical work on English literature by exploring the interdependence of English and continental European literatures in writing by women. While later volumes will deal with specific texts, this introductory volume provides a descriptive framework and a theoretical basis for studies in the field. Covering issues such as the role of English as a world language, the definition of 'Europe', and the current state of Translation Studies, the book also surveys theories of intertextuality and demonstrates intertextual links between written and visual and film texts. This book is itself pioneering in making a systematic approach to women's writings in English in the context of other European cultures. Although Europe is a political reality, this cultural interpenetration remains largely unexamined, and these essays represent an important first step towards revealing that unexplored richness.

Journeys Exposed: Women's Writing, Photography, and Mobility examines contemporary literature written by women that are all in different ways related to Italy. It argues that photography provides women with a means to expose aspects of their nomadic self and of the others’ mobile lives within and beyond the writing process. By resorting to the visual, women individualistically respond to forms of hegemonic power, fragmentation, displacement, loss and marginality, and make these experiences key to their creative production.

From amateur experiments in scrapbooks and stereographs to contemporary photobook collaborations between leading practitioners, poets and photographers have created an art form that continues to evolve and deserves critical exploration. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History represents the first account of this challenging and diverse body of work. Nott traces the development of photopoetic collaboration from its roots in 19th-century illustrative practices to the present day. Focusing on work from the UK and US, he examines how and why poets and photographers collaborate, and explores the currents of exchange and engagement between poems and photographs on the page. The book not only considers canonical figures, but brings to light forgotten practitioners whose work questioned and shaped the relationship between word and image. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History provides a new lens through which to explore poetry, photography, and the spaces between them.

Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates the importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. "Ordering the Facade" traces the visual and literary cultures of sou