Note on our eBooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) on the free Fordham Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.
What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portrait’s subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painter’s sense of self. Analyzing the viewer’s relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision.
“With its broad international reach, its canny and often remarkable choices, its solid scholarship and linguistic grounding, and its theoretical engagement, Portrait Stories opens up significant new perspectives on the literature of a century.”
Ginsburg makes an engaging and significant contribution by identifying portraits and portraiture as an important topos in nineteenth-century European narrative literature.
Mixing well-known work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray with relatively undiscussed examples by Honore de Balzac and George Sand, Ginsburg defines a new corpus and isolates the multiple ways in which subject and representation are entangled with each other and the act of readerly interpretation .---—SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Michal Peled Ginsburg is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies and Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel as well as the co-author of a book on the Israeli novelist David Shahar.