Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of three schools of literary criticism: New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. These three schools exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. The chapters in this book focus on genre, realism, and relations with visual art. Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory. Meanwhile, chapters on realism demonstrate how the development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. They distinguish medieval and Renaissance realisms from the realism of pre-modern novels. Finally, chapters on visual art consider how conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. The essays also look at emblems and emblematic poems.

The Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and Beaumont

This study offers a biography of the friendship between Wordsworth and Beaumont, exploring Lady Beaumont’s role in generating an inter-familial relationship of heartfelt sympathy. It also offers detailed analysis of key poems and paintings that resulted from their artistic exchange: the first section offers a new reading of ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, placing the poem in the context of a series of letters that channel a discussion of hope and aspiration through Sir Joshua Reynolds’s theory of ‘Ideal Form’; the second focuses on the paintings Beaumont produced to accompany Wordsworth’s poetry, situating them within early nineteenth-century debates about the Sister Arts; the third examines Beaumont’s fascination with a passage from The Excursion, arguing that its composition was inflected by a painting in Beaumont’s collection, Peter Paul Rubens’s Autumn Landscape. The study concludes with an exploration of the principles that underpinned Beaumont’s campaign for a National Gallery.

Subtitling Calligraphy

This essay examines a regional, not global, dimension of Chinese cinema: the Chinese character in its brushed form. Calligraphy and cinema have an intimate relationship in East Asia. Indeed, the ubiquity of the brushed word in cinema is one element that actually ties works in Korean, Japanese and Sinophone Asia together as a regional cinema. At the same time, I will explore the very specific difference of Chinese filmmakers’ use of written language. On first glance, cinema and calligraphy would appear as radically different art forms. On second glance, they present themselves as sister arts. Both are art forms built from records of the human body moving in (an absent) time and space. The essay ends with a consideration of subtitling, upon which Chinese cinema’s global dimension is predicated. How does investigating this very problem lead us to rethinking the nature of the cinematic subtitle, which is very much alive―a truly movable type?

Visual Rhetoric

This literature review traces recent scholarship on a particular form of communication that uses images for persuasive purposes: visual rhetoric. Disciplines within the purview of this literature review include writing studies, speech, communication, education, and marketing as well as, to a limited degree, anthropology, information science, art history, architecture, and design. The chapter will discuss three main theoretical constructs which ground scholarship in this field: rhetoric, iconology, and semiotics. The chapter will then explore how the Sister Arts tradition has been evoked as a potential model for interdisciplinary scholarly work; describe the propensity for social justice in writing studies pedagogy; identify convergence and divergence in scholarship on visual rhetoric that hold promise for new avenues of interdisciplinary research; and introduce scholarship in education and information science that sheds new light on the topic.

Michael Field

The allure of the connection between literature, journey and the sister arts interlaces with the endeavours of human beings and with the act of writing about it, of transforming it into a story and sharing it with others (Pantini 1999). The poems included in the collection Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field, male pseudonym of authoresses Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper, not only manage to celebrate the affiliation between literature and the figurative arts, but they also become a verbal representation of the visual art, namely of that ékphrasis deemed to be as an exchange between visual and textual cultures. In this analysis, the revolutionary ekphrastic inspiration of the two authoresses will validate the possibility of observing art and reality in a different way and translating it into poetic texts so as to allow the rise of that political capability of subverting Victorian identities and social hierarchies.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter 2 documents that, in contrast to more recent theories that have rendered adaptation a bad theoretical object, prior to the late eighteenth century, adaptation was theorized as a good theoretical object, fostering an innovative, progressive, national aesthetic culture and situating artists in a long lineage reaching back to classical Greece. Subsequently, late eighteenth-century Romantic theories of originality and theories of the arts as separate species militated against adaptation in the same way that theologies of original creation and scientific theories of separate species would militate against theories of biological adaptation in the late nineteenth century. Even so, some nineteenth-century theorists continued to valorize adaptation equivocally as a means of civilizing the lower classes and foreign cultures, even as its aesthetic deficiencies offended the higher ranked, fiercely nationalist arbiters of civilization and culture. Copyright laws, which did not apply when a work changed medium until the early twentieth century in Britain and other nations, intensified the opprobrium cast upon adaptation in a rhetoric of theft at home and piracy abroad. Even so, some critics maintained that adaptation is original when created by an original genius; others valorized intermedial adaptation in a pseudo-religious discourse of realization of the word made flesh; yet others pitted sister arts theories against theories of the arts as separate species that cannot mate to produce adaptation, although both militated against the reproductive, generative capacities of adaptation. These discourses were not limited to academics and reviewers, but extended to the adaptation industry.