The Culture of Ekphrasis in America's Age of Print, 1830-1880.

The Culture of Ekphrasis in America's Age of Print, 1830-1880, examines the verbal representation of the visual arts in poetry, prose and nonfiction works throughout the expansion of nineteenth-century print publishing. The advancement of print technologies after the 1830s meant that engravings—in books, in magazines, and as freestanding prints—were increasingly accessible to middle-class consumers. In turn, genres of writing that worked to describe, critique and expound on these visual images also proliferated, in forms including travelogues, lyrics, verse drama, and art criticism. But the literary description of artwork did more than supplement imagery: it directly confronted developing ideas of authorship in the age of print. This dissertation highlights understudied ekphrastic works by popular nineteenth-century writers, arguing that this genre of art description provides unique insight into authorship and audience in an era of expanding literary production. Each of the four chapters locates a specific scene in the cultural history of ekphrasis, using archival and print sources to show the central role that art description played in defining shifting literary relationships during this period. Precisely at the moment that the falling costs of image reproduction reduce the pragmatic function of art description, ekphrasis proliferated to reflect on the new modes of reading that these technologies allowed. Lydia Sigourney’s ekphrastic lyrics, including “The Last Supper”(1834) and “Power’s Statue of the Greek Slave”(1854), stress the close bonds between author and reader, and use imitation as a key term in the relation between artwork, author and audience. Sophia Hawthorne’s travelogue Notes in England and Italy (1869) balances art and family description to maintain a distinction between Hawthorne’s personal and authorial personae. Henry Longfellow’s posthumously published Michaelangelo: A Fragment (1883) shows the author’s eclectic (and publicly accessible) home art collection as a model for an inclusive literary mode. And Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny Osgood’s exchange of works around the Pygmalion myth trace Osgood’s gradual retreat from familiar intimacy with her readers. Through these principal works, this dissertation locates often-overlooked popular ekphrasis as essential to defining nineteenth-century relations between authors and audiences.PhDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96087/1/vogchris_1.pd