Eugène Delacroix

Michele Hannoosh

The "Journal" of Eugene Delacroix is one of the most important works in the literature of art history: the record of a life at once public and private, it is also one of the richest and most fascinating aesthetic documents of the nineteenth century, as Delacroix reflects throughout on the relations between the arts, especially painting and writing. Indeed, he approaches the question from a unique perspective, that of a painter who wrote extensively and theorized his own writing in the "Journal," a painter who had a passion for literature and a powerful literary imagination, a narrative painter whose work is rooted in literature and the literary. This book is the first to explore the crucial importance of this relation for Delacroix's aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Countering the long critical tradition which sees his writing as the inverse of his painting, it argues that, through his diary and art criticism, he sought to develop a painter's writing, proper to painting itself, and that such a writing is closely related to his conception of pictorial art. This approach has significant implications for interpreting the narratives of his public decorations, four of which are analyzed here: the library schemes of the Senate and the Assemblee Nationale, the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre, and the Chapel of the Holy Angels at the church of Saint-Sulpice. Delacroix's ideas on the theoretical and practical relations between writing and painting, narrative and the image, are shown to be central not only to his aesthetic, but also to his views on civilization, history, and culture, and on the role of the artist in the modern world.

Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix

Demonstrates the crucial role that art-writing played as a tool of historical analysis in the work of the Romantic historian Jules Michelet's work, decisively influencing his most important historical concepts, his idea of history, and his view of the practice of the historian.

Writing Art and History in Nineteenth-Century France

Jules Michelet

David Scott

Charlotte Schoell-Glass

Martin Heusser

The essays in this collection are a selection of the papers given at the Fifth International Conference on Word and Image Studies, Claremont, CA, 14-20 March, 1999.

Word & Image Interactions 3

Text and Visuality

Laforgue's collection of stories, the "Moralites legendaires, " freely modernizes established stories of literary tradition according to the stereotypical preoccupations of 1880s Decadence. In this first complete study of the "Moralites" in any language, Laforgue's stories emerge as brilliant examples of parody in its most creative form, among the most original prose creations of the late nineteenth century. Laforgue is known to most English-speaking readers as an influence on T. S. Eliot. In France he is considered a major writer, alongside Symbolist writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme. Laforgue's stories fully exploit the creative possibilities of parody, and thus make a particularly illuminating contribution, resolving many long-standing theoretical questions. The stories provide a rich source for investigating the procedures of parody and for formulating a sufficiently general and flexible theory to account for the diversity of its form over time. Hannoosh examines the 1880s notion of Decadence with which Laforgue's "Moralites" plays and attempts to revise the prevailing view of the movement to reflect the importance of parody therein. She provides close readings of the six stories: "Hamlet, Le Miracle des Roses, Lohengrin, Salome, Persee et Andromede, " and "Pan et la Syrinx." Using an intertextual model of literary theory, Michele Hannoosh derives a theory of the genre overall and addresses the issues raised by metafictional theories of parody from the Russian Formalists onward. Michele Hannoosh is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. She has written many articles on nineteenth-century French literature and art."

Michele Hannoosh

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