Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction : The Ekphrastic Novel

This book addresses the recent surge of Anglo-American novels about visual art since the 2010s and interprets it as a coming of age of an old literary sub-genre, which is here termed as the 'ekphrastic novel'.These novels are distinguished by their systematic use of ekphrasis which creatively and critically negotiates the intertwined aesthetics of literature and visual art.By addressing the challenge of representing visual images such as photographs, paintings, and art installations with words, these novels reveal a greater interest in exploring how and why we engage with art, rather than merely depicting the art itself.In this way, ekphrastic novels present themselves as powerful practitioners and critics of contemporary image-making.The book focuses on four aspects emerging from ekphrastic passages--value, form, affect, and scale--to explore critical questions posed by contemporary ekphrastic novels: Who has the power to assign value today, and at what cost?Which social, political, h