Claudia Tobin
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474455138
- eISBN:
- 9781474481212
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474455138.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an ...
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The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It proposes that still life can be understood not only as a genre of visual art but also as a mode of attentiveness and a way of being in the world. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.
Modernism and Still Life reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement. The still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm, an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.Less
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It proposes that still life can be understood not only as a genre of visual art but also as a mode of attentiveness and a way of being in the world. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.
Modernism and Still Life reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement. The still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm, an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.