Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Romanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis

Romanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis

Dickson, Polly

Paperback

Art HistoryLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 139950651X
ISBN13: 9781399506519
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: Jan 1 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Since Plato's Republic, mimesis -- the artwork's tacit claim to reflect or imitate real life -- has faced a near-constant stream of assaults, being accused of naturalising a supposedly uncomplicated relationship between world and fiction. Lines of Mimesis offers a revisionary account of mimesis. Specifically, it proposes a rethinking of the representational attitudes of two literary schools usually understood to be at odds with one another -- Romanticism and Realism -- through close readings of writings and drawings made by two figures usually taken to be proponents of those schools respectively: E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. Across these readings, Dickson argues that a more capacious understanding of mimesis is achieved when we understand it to pertain not to the reduplication of objects in the world, but to a negotiation of the subject's sensory entwinement with those objects. This new understanding can, in turn, more closely illuminate an artwork's own reflections on its relationship to the world, shedding light on the entanglements and crossovers between Romanticism and Realism.

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