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Although much has been written lately on the links between painting and writing, little or no attention has been paid to those moments in literature when the narrative stops to allow for the description of those objects associated with still life.
Rosemary Lloyd’s new book, Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life (Cornell University Press), shows how fascinating this overlooked area is; how rich in suggestions of class, race and gender; how much it indicates about human pleasures and about the experience of space and time. Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French and professor of gender studies at IUB.
While she makes frequent reference to paintings, she focuses above all on written still lifes, particularly those moments when novels pause to address the subject matter of still life—a bowl of fruit, a hat rack, a desk cluttered with pens and papers—in ways that invite contemplation of other and broader cultural domains. She draws on literary and art works from Australia, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United States.
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