Böcker av Murray Roston

Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In Modernist Patterns, Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith. By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, Modernist Patterns expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.

What, if any, is the relationship between Charles Dickens and the decorative arts? Between Henry James and Art Nouveau? Between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the paintings of the Impressionists? Recent trends in scholarship have begun to reassess the assumption that the arts of painting and literature are too fundamentally disparate to permit a fruitful comparison between the two. In Victorian Contexts, Murray Roston puts that assumption to rest with imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, painting, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century. Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, he argues that in every generation there is a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way. Eminently readable, Victorian Contexts is accessible to general readers as well as scholars of literature, the visual arts, and nineteenth-century culture.

Examines how both artist and writer in the Victorian era responded to the shared challenges, assumptions, and dilemmas of their time, often unaware that the same problems were being confronted in the kindred media.