Mining the borderlands where history meets literature in Britain and Europe as well as America, this book shows how the imminence and outbreak of World War II ignited the imaginations of writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, and James Joyce to Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Irene Nemirovsky. Taking its cue from Percy Shelley's dictum that great writers are to some extent created by the age in which they live, this book shows how much the politics and warfare of the years from 1939 to 1941 drove the literature of this period. Its novels, poems, and plays differ radically from histories of World War II because-besides being works of imagination-- they are largely products of a particular stage in the author's life as well as of a time at which no one knew how the war would end. This is the first comprehensive study of the impact of the outbreak of the Second World War on the literary work of American, English, and European writers during its first years.

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey "to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "the giving and taking of hospitality is sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of our greatest writings, including Christ's Last Supper, Macbeth's murder of his royal guest, and Camus's short story on French colonialism in Arab Algeria. By means of such examples and many more, this book considers what literary hosts, hostesses, and guests do "to "as well as "for "each other. In doing so, it shows how often treachery rends the fabric of trust that hospitality weaves.

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures.
In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

Why is the anniversary of the French Revolution celebrated on July 14, the day the Bastille was stormed, rather than on August 26, the day the Declaration of the Rights of Man was signed? Why don't the French do as the Americans, who see their revolution epitomized by the signing of the Declaration of Independence? "There is surely something to be learned from contemplating the difference between these two ways of representing a revolution," writes James Heffernan. In this volume, he and 13 other distinguished scholars consider representations of the French Revolution in literature, historical narratives, and art as central to understanding it. Challenging the idea that history is a body of fact separable from fictions wrought by literature and the visual arts, they show that study of a major historical event inevitably leads to study of representation.

Compares the common concerns and impulses behind the works of four artists and writers, and demonstrates that the verbal and visual sides of romanticism are parts of a coherent whole.

Though English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein , the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art.