The moving still: Ekphrasis in the nineteenth-century British novel

This study argues that ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual art, uniquely reveals and preserves intellectual, ethical and aesthetic knowledge in the nineteenth-century British novel. W. J. T. Mitchell observes that pictures and words share the ability to inform and persuade in their creation of images and arguments. Thus, when George Eliot poses Dorothea Brooke beside the Ariadne sculpture, her observers imagine a suffering heroism and classical beauty as idea and picture. Henry James' revolutionary bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, represents the desire and discomfort aroused both by the poetic word and by this same word printed and bound beautifully in a material text. Thomas Hardy's words re-create a photograph of Sue Bridehead that inspires illusionary images within Jude which ironically lead him to truth. This dissertation applies several ekphrasis theories to specific novels as it first considers how this trope stimulates sensory perception and intellectual conception of the universal and particular human condition and choice and secondarily examines how ekphrastic aesthetics move us morally and emotionally.; While these ends of ekphrasis significantly shape the nineteenth-century British novel, the work of ekphrasis itself also intrigues the reader. Ekphrasis orchestrates a revolutionary exchange of roles between the word that usually moves the narrative and the picture that usually stills the narrative, further drawing attention to the dynamic role of art in the novel. At other times, the word and picture seem to struggle against each other, revealing, for example, how the conflict between realism and illusion curiously illuminates the truth. Even though the knowledge stimulated by ekphrasis might startle, confuse or otherwise trouble the seeker, this knowledge identifies the true nature of both character and reader. According to Elaine Scarry, when we see the beautiful in nature's or humanity's art, we desire to continue to gaze upon it. The story prompted by the image or the image's description incited by narrative crisis reveal a novelist's attempt to "perpetuate" and "distribute" this beauty. Ekphrasis, this study concludes, is that process awakening idea and emotion in narrative images in order to preserve art as both a visual and verbal extension of humanity's truth.