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My article is divided into three sections. The first surveys the extant literary evidence for the details of the story of Danaus and Aegyptus. I then examine its importance for Statius’s narrative and unearth the outline of Egypt as a mythical landscape via the significant patronymic Statius uses ( Belides ) in the parade of ancestors—to be read in close connection with the foundational stories of Argos. In the third section, finally, I consider Aegyptus’s portrayal in the hope of amending scholarly views of his presumed innocence by offering a link to Silvae 1.1 and Domitian’s countenance on his equestrian statue in the Forum as seen through Statius’s eyes. In sum, this article reflects on Statius’s renewal of the overdetermined Labdacid mythic tradition, with the grounding of its Egyptian background. This article also contributes to historicising trends in the study of the Thebaid , as well as probing the diegetic role of ekphrasis in the poem and the ekphrasis’ possible, distilled reverberations in the cultural milieu of Domitianic Rome.

This article presents an interpretation of some functions performed by ekphrastic structures in the context of Ancient fictional narrative prose. Concrete examples are taken from two Ancient Greek novels: by Longus and by Achilles Tatius. Using Olga Freidenberg’s conceptual and interpretative apparatus as a lens for reading the textual material, the central claim of the article is that within Ancient prose narrative, ekphrasis and metaphor are functionally interrelated, with ekphrasis serving to metaphorically embed narrative content within the mythological, affective, and genre-related fields of the textual production of meaning. At the same time, while adopting Freidenberg’s definition of metaphor as a primal state of cognitive indistinction between image and concept, the article attempts to go beyond her mythological interpretation of the Ancient novel and to provide a more socially and historically relevant understanding of the semantic features of this genre.

In the novels Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man , and Life & Times of Michael K , J.M. Coetzee fashions an ethical mode of \"writing photographs\" rather than \"writing about photographs\" via the technique of ekphrasis to recreate in prose several vivid and often unsettling images. Through ekphrasis, the reader becomes what Liliane Louvel terms a \"reader/viewer\" and is drawn into a palimpsestic encounter in which the image activates collective knowledge and experiences of visual media. The use of ekphrasis comes with unique ethical imperatives. Close analysis enables an exploration into the strategies of writing, such as foregrounding what is unseen, that Coetzee employs to respond to such concerns.

This cutting-edge collection of essays showcases the work of some of the most influential theorists of the past thirty years as they grapple with the question of how literature should be treated in contemporary theory. The contributors challenge trends that have recently dominated the field--especially those that emphasize social and political issues over close reading and other analytic methods traditionally associated with literary criticism. Written especially for this collection, these essays argue for the importance of aesthetics, poetics, and aesthetic theory as they present new and stimulating perspectives on the directions which theory and criticism will take in the future. In addition to providing a selection of distinguished critics writing at their best, this collection is valuable because it represents a variety of fields and perspectives that are not usually found together in the same volume. Michael Clark's introduction provides a concise, cogent history of major developments and trends in literary theory from World War II to the present, making the entire volume essential reading for students and scholars of literature, literary theory, and philosophy.

This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures operate in an ekphrastic mode.

The term ekphrasis is traditionally defined as the verbal description of visual art. However, due to technological advancements, its meaning has expanded to encompass photography, film and digital media. The study of ekphrasis has been advanced significantly by scholars such as James Heffernan and W.J.T. Mitchell, and recent works by researchers including Marie-Eirini Panagiotidou and Asuncion Lopez-Valera Azcarate have explored its connections to the ut pictura poesis tradition. Rooted in Horace's maxim, ut pictura poesis shaped Renaissance art theory by drawing on Aristotle's Poetics and rhetorical traditions. It played a pivotal role in the paragone debate, which compared different artistic forms and distinguished spatial from temporal arts. This concept was later formalised by Lessing, yet intermedial studies have revitalised the concept, expanding its analytical scope. The study of intermediality, defined as the interactions among artistic forms, has deepened the relevance of ekphrasis, highlighting its role in contemporary aesthetic experiences. The transition from static images to moving ones exemplifies the evolution of visual representation. This paper offers an integrated synthesis of ut pictura poesis and contemporary intermedial theory, providing a framework that clarifies key conceptual overlaps while tracing their implications for twenty-first-century aesthetics. Keywords: ut pictura poesis, ekphrasis, paragone, intermediality, visual representation, verbal description

The essay examines Alexander Pope's dual role as poet and land artist through his creation of a grotto at Twickenham and his description of his grotto in verse and letters. With a focus on Pope's practical approach to art, it highlights Pope's ecological aesthetics and his ability to create environments using the different media of words and earth.

Despite the publication of three books directly addressing the intersection between text and visual artworks — Fishing for Amber (1999), Shamrock Tea (2001), Still Life (2019) — Ciaran Carson’s work has not been given significant attention in terms of his contribution to the subject of ekphrastic poetry in Irish literature. Several texts, on the other hand, have been devoted to discussing his work in relation to the spatial, place-bound quality of his poetry and prose. This article seeks to bridge this gap by reframing the ekphrastic mode as the intimate but illusory coming into contact between author, reader, and work. Using the dual role of the ‘study’ as both a practice drawing and a private room, this paper argues Ciaran Carson’s final collection, Still Life, represents a new interpretation of how intimate connections in domestic spaces can be portrayed in Northern Irish literature.

Throughout the entire literary oeuvre of Miroslav Krleža we are faced with a great number of credible descriptions, describing real historic events, or real artists and artworks belonging to the rich resources of European art history. By applying a cryptographic method of incorporating descriptions into his texts, Krleža on the one hand hid his sources, while on the other also revealed them. He hid them in the tissue of fictional texts, and unmasked them using a key work only those familiar with the source could identify. We term this method the use of “belletristic cryptograms”, and can further categorise it into thematic subgroups of concealed artwork descriptions, naming this whole method the use of hidden ekphrasis. The choice of artworks Krleža describes in his work is comprehensive, diverse and each described differently. Since we are dealing with literary texts, descriptions are often used in the function of a wide array of interpretative strategies of depiction; in some aspects, they are used as a mere glimpse into a piece of art with the goal of visually associating, evoking or minutely symbolizing the incorporeal frame of an artist’s mind or of the wider social context. In other aspects, the artworks are richly and meticulously presented with regard to their importance and credibility as they, according to Krleža, possess an “ethical intelligence” and “ethical conscience”. Only Krleža’s prose is researched here, and this is done on two levels. We take a look at examples where real art is incorporated into fictional texts in order to determine the significance and meaning of a certain dialogue, mise-en-scène or situation. This is most commonly found in the author’s plays, novels and novellas. On the other hand, we can trace a completely opposite method by which artworks enter these texts, where, due to their historic determination and already established worth/status, they thus re-enter reality, as seen from the perspective of Krleža’s life and work, so as to yet again test art history’s credibility through the matrix of contemporaneity. This approach is most often found in Krleža’s essays, critiques and diary entries.

This paper seeks to carry out an analysis of the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue in the character of Mariana in both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s homonymous poem and its subsequent pictorial representation in a painting by John Everett Millais. The character of Mariana is taken from Shakespeare’s comedy, Measure for Measure, which was published in the First Folio in 1623. By contrast, in 1832, Lord Tennyson introduces the character in his homonymous poem, “Mariana”, as a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection to society. Through interfigurality, Tennyson opts to present her as a “tragic” heroine and she is depicted from a pessimistic perspective. The process of interfigurality entails a conversion stage of reverse ekphrasis through which Shakespeare’s source text is turned into another text, Tennyson’s poem. This interaction between both texts is later turned into two visual expressions. In doing so, both texts are later transferred into John Everett Millais’s painting. Millais’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem and Shakespeare’s play involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. Taking this approach, this paper will analyse the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue between the poem “Mariana” and its visual representation in Millais’s artistic manifestations.