Ekphrasis as Portrait: A. S. Byatt’s Fictional and Visual Doppelgänger

Ekphrasis is a highly codified conceptual site which hosts enquiries into logo-centrism, aesthetic autonomy, and the interplay of description and narration. Post-modern ekphrasis reveals mutations of the structural and thematic constants which have been constitutive since antiquity. With A.S. Byatt ekphrasis challenges the tradition of the painterly and of the literary portrait. She recuperates the rhetorical and literary ekphrastic tradition in order to shift the emphasis from the ‘content of ekphrasis’ to ‘ekphrasis as container.’ Portraits in Fiction bears witness to my contention that the question post-modern writers pose is no longer what can be in ekphrasis? but what can ekphrasis be? The critical discourse on visual and verbal modes of portraying developed in Portraits in Fiction demonstrates that ekphrasis is both a container and a maker of visual images, meta-artistic inquiry, logo-centrism and, more intriguingly, narration