From the appreciation of female beauty as Botticellian to the acknowledgement of the
Van-Goghian pathos of Provençal landscapes the ekphrastic gaze of a British postmodern
observer offers a socioculturally conditioned vision of artistically aesthetically modified
reality. Looking at over thirty works including Julian Barnes's Metroland (1980) John Fowles's
The Magus (1965) and Michael Frayn's Headlong (1999) this book addresses the phenomenon of
the 'ekphrastic gaze' and provides a comprehensive survey of its poetics and politics in
British postmodern fiction. Drawing upon a combination of theories and approaches from Literary
Studies Art Studies Cultural Studies and the Social Sciences this study investigates the
ways in which the ekphrastic gaze contributes to the (de- re-)construction of a broad variety
of iconographical and iconological meanings within the all-encompassing shift from modernism
modernity towards postmodernism postmodernity in British fiction. It introduces the concept of
the postmodern chronotope of the (pseudo-)connoisseurial quest and the character type of the
(Pseudo-)Connoisseur that this chronotope relies on delineates the functions of the ekphrastic
gaze as a deconstructionist reading tool and last but not least sheds light on the
meta-ekphrastic interplay between the fictional ekphrastic discourse and the metanarratives of
Art History Art Theory and Aesthetics through the recycling of socioculturally prevalent and
authoritative formulae of artistic aesthetic perception. Contents 1. A Postmodern Déjà Vu
................................................................................ 1 2. The
Postmodern Turn Through the Ekphrastic Gaze ................................. 17 3. In the
Interstices between Art Words and Life ........................................ 33 3.1 Could
a Life be a Work of Art? ............................................................. 33 3.2
The Compositional Fabrication of Ekphrastic Reality ............................... 43 3.3 The
Iconography and the Iconology of Ekphrastic Reality........................ 53 3.3.1 The
Ekphrastic Gaze and the Third Dimension of a Work of Art: From the Removal of Three Centuries
of Dirt to the Revelation of a Gainsboroughesque Dream ........................... 58 3.3.2 The
Ekphrastic Gaze and the 'Docile Body': From the Antichrist's Michelangelesque Curls to Erato's
Rokeby Venus Pose ......................................................... 68 3.4 Conclusion
.................................................................................................
81 4. In the Interstices between the Gazes of Author Character and Reader .... 83 4.1 Who Was
the Ekphrastic Beholder After All? ........................................... 83 4.2 The
Dialectic of the Ekphrastic Beholder as the (Pseudo-)Connoisseur
..................................................................... 89 4.2.1 Through the
(Pseudo-)'Intellectual Lens' of the Ekphrastic Beholder's Gaze: The 'Bloody Ruskin' of British
Postmodern Fiction .......................................................... 93 4.2.2 On the
(Pseudo-)'Moral Retina' of the Ekphrastic Beholder's Gaze: The 'Con-Turned-Artist' of British
Postmodern Fiction ........................................................ 104 4.3 The
Interplay between the Ekphrastic Gazes of Author Character and Reader
............................................................................. 113 4.3.1
Following in the Footsteps of Author and Character: The 'Scholarly' and 'Alert' Mock Reader of
British Postmodern Fiction ........................................................... 116
4.3.2 The Real Reader's Ekp
