Title: 'If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand'
First published: October 1998
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.
Subjects: Art and literature, Description (Rhetoric), English Painting, English poetry, History, History and criticism, Nothing (Philosophy) in literature, Painting, English, Poetry, history and criticism, Literature, modern, history and criticism, 19th century, Painting, history, Free will and determinism, Art, modern, 19th century, Poetry, modern, history and criticism, Nothing (Philosophy)
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR585.A78 S73 1999