Studies in Visual Culture

By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters' mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience's aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose-Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara-as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

Modern art in Britain during the early twentieth century is a complex and compromised proposition. It has frequently appeared selective in its assimilation (or rejection) of European modernism, with the results proving uneven and sometimes flawed in coherence as well as quality – from an international outlook to a reductive vorticist blast, from an insular 'English' modernism to a purist abstraction, from a British neo-romanticism to an earnest accommodation of French surrealism. This book reads critically the context of modernist visual art in the interwar, conceding ultimately to the absence of one representative manifestation in order to account for circuits of ruptures and seizures from which emerge singular instances negotiating the radically new European modernism. The emergence of Ceri Richards as a modernist of remarkable originality in London between the wars poses one such singularity, setting the artist as focus for the present study in critical analysis of a globally trenchant avant-garde and aspects of art in Britain read as tributary to the greater European exchange.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud, the volatile genius of French poetry, invented a language that captured the energy and visual complexity of the modern world. This book explores some of the technical aspects of this language in relation to the new techniques brought forth by the Impressionist painters such as Monet, Morisot, and Pissarro.