Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art

This book questions the assumption of a single realism, the continuous realism of novels. Many suppose that narrative before the novel either looked forward to it or was medieval and allegorical, and compare the introduction of single-point perspective with the rise of the novel. But continuous realism did not arise as soon as perspective was discovered. In actuality, a distinctive sort of Renaissance realism, with its own conventions, was practised from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Renaissance Realism surveys the history of perspective, showing that it only gradually came to dominate the western imagination and to become the default assumption for portrayal in the visual arts. Looked at in this way, correlates between literature and art emerge in the depiction of objects and events. Treatment of spatial arrangement and time sequences, for example, closely parallel 'simultaneous narration' in the visual arts.

Table of Contents:
Preface List of Illustrations Glossary Abbreviations 1: Objects in space 2: Events in time 3: Time sequences and schemes 4: Narrative assumptions 5: Engaged and disengaged spectators 6: Britomart and Busirane 7: Shakespeare's realism 8: Conclusion Index

About the Author :
Professor Alastair Fowler is Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh.

Review :
`...a valuable investigation of a kind of literary period eye, reminding readers of the fact that no text, visual or written, is comprehensible without a close consideration of contemporary interests and practices.' Sixteenth-Century Journal `In his latest and perhaps most ambitious book, the varied paths pursued by Alastair Fowler during his distinguished career in Renaissance literary criticism may be said to converge' Times Literary Supplement `Oxford University Press have been generous in their allowance for beautifully reproduced plates of these numerous examples.' Times Literary Supplement `Fowler's Renaissance Realism certainly deserves the highest commendation for asking large and recently neglected questions about the nature of mimesis before modernity, and it affords a wealth of persuasive evidence for the contention that viewing habits chaged only gradually over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.' Times Literary Supplement `Renaissance Realism is...a valuable investigation of a kind of literary period eye, reminding readers of the fact that no text, visual or written, is comprehensible without a close consideration of contemporary interests and practices.' Sixteenth Century Journal