'If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand'
Subtitle: The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting (Literature and the Visual Arts)
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing; Lang AG International Academic Publishers, Peter
Published: October 1998
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 299
ISBN-13: 9780820440637
Subjects: Criticism; European; Poetry; 19th Century English Poetry; English Literature (Specific Aspects); Literary Criticism; Art & Art Instruction; 19th century; Art and literature; Description (Rhetoric); English poetry; Great Britain; History; History and criticism
Description: This study examines the role of indeterminacy - what Chesterton called "the final skepticism which can find no floor to the universe" - in nineteenth-century British art.

Beginning in 1806 with Wordsworth's questioning of the essential ground and companion-ableness of things and concluding with Hardy's dramatization in Wessex Poems of the treacherous relationship between the word and the image, 'If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand' chronicles the growing sense of the antagonism of things as evidenced in the irreconcilable tension between the visual and the verbal. The writers examined here rely in varying degrees and at critical junctures in their artistic careers on the pictorial to forge analogs as evidence of the kindredness of things.

Their failure testifies to their sense that all is, as De Quincey observed, "irrelate," indeterminate.