Writing for art is a concise introduction to the subject of ekphrasis, and the first study to offer a useful general survey of the larger philosophical and theoretical questions arising from the encounter of literary texts and artworks. Stephen Cheeke offers close readings of poems and prose from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside a generous amount of illustrations, covering a broad range of writing and theory about the relation of literary texts to the visual arts, and extending the subject of ekphrasis to include literary works on photography, as well as celebrated prose descriptions of artworks. -- .

Transfiguration explores the work of John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater, treating in particular the ways in which they engaged with the Christian content of their subject, and, in Pater's case, how the art of Christianity was contrasted with classical sculpture. Stephen Cheeke examines two related phenomena: idolatry (a false substitution, a sexual betrayal), and the poetics of transfiguration (to elevate or glorify subject matter not thought of as conventionally poetic, to praise). Central to the book is the question of the 'translation' of religion into art and aesthetics, a process which supposedly undergirds the advent of the museum age and makes possible the idea of a 'religion of art' as a phenomenon of late century Aestheticism. Such a phenomenon is prepared for, however, through the engagement with Christian painting and classical sculpture in the work of these four writers. All four thought carefully about the ways in which a particular mimetic impulse of 'making-live' in artworks could be connected to religious experience. This meant exploring the nature of the link between seeing and believing-visualising in order to conceive, to verify, but also in the sense of being acted upon by the visible. All four wrote about the great power of artworks to transfigure the objects of their attention. In each case, there emerges the possibility of a secret sexual knowledge hiding within, or lying on the other side of the sensuous knowledge of aesthesis. All four wondered whether this was inherently hostile to Christianity, or whether it may, finally, be an accommodation within it.

Some people called them Cane & Able, but to Justin they were just Dad and Abe, two of the greatest men in his life... Remember how you felt when you were learning how to drive? You were nervous. You were scared. Your heart raced and your mouth was dry. You were so afraid of failure, you almost called it quits. It's the summer of '59 and young Justin Cane is learning to drive the family farm truck. Able Johnson, his father's longtime, trusted black farmhand becomes his mentor and teacher. Life, as Justin knew it to be, was about to change forever when the two unlikely traveling companions are confronted with the wonder of God's creations and the cruelty of life when they take to the open road.