Enfilade

From Rowman & Littlefield:

Timothy Erwin, Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 310 pages, ISBN: 978-1611485691 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1611485707 (ebook), $95 / £60.

A stylish critique of literary attitudes towards painting, Textual Vision explores the simultaneous rhetorical formation and empirical fragmentation of visual reading in enlightenment Britain. Beginning with an engaging treatment of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Timothy Erwin takes the reader on a guided tour of the pointed allusion, apt illustration, or the subtle appeal to the mind’s eye within a wide array of genres and texts, before bringing his linked case studies to a surprising close with the fiction of Jane Austen.

At once carefully researched, theoretically informed and highly imaginative, Textual Vision situates textual vision at the cultural crossroads of ancient pictura-poesis doctrine and modernist aesthetics. It provides reliable interpretive poles for reading enlightenment imagery, offers vivid new readings of familiar works, and promises to invigorate the study of Restoration and eighteenth-century visual culture.

Timothy Erwin is professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Short Titles

Introduction: Image, Ekphrasis, and Verbal Coloring
1  Bold Design in Alexander Pope
2  Promise and Performance in Johnson’s Life of Savage Plates Gallery
3  Visual Discourse in Hogarth, the Early Novel, and History
4  Picturing Jane Austen

Bibliography
Index