Explores the 19th century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. This book shows how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike.
"Art of the Everyday is a work of extraordinary scholarship that significantly expands our understanding both of realism and of Dutch painting. All the big subjects related to realism are here, all handled with utmost care. One of the most satisfying things about this learned, insightful book is that it gives the impression of absolute saturation in the art and in the fictions, and thus it earns its authority in both fields."--George Levine, author of The Realistic Imagination
"I tremendously enjoyed reading Art of the Everyday. One of the great pleasures it offers is the revisiting of something commonly assumed to be self-evident--the comparison between realist fiction and Dutch art. Ruth Yeazell makes us realize just how blind we've been to the range of implications this comparison carries with it. Lucid, knowledgeable, and extremely readable, this exciting book deepens our understanding of all that's at stake in the cultural politics of realism."--Kate Flint, author of The Victorians and the Visual Imagination
"Extremely thorough and precise but written with elegance and fluidity, Art of the Everyday is an excellent and entertaining book that impressively integrates the art-historical and the literary."--Martha Hollander, author of An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art
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Art of the Everyday is one of those rare works that succeeds in comparing these media while doing full justice to their differences and complexities. Yeazell's close readings of nineteenth-century narratives are matched by her vivid interpretations of Dutch paintings, several of which are reproduced in stunning full-color plates. The book is useful not only for the argument it makes about the influence of Dutch painting on the nineteenth-century novel, but also for the high standard it sets for future interdisciplinary studies. . . .
Art of the Everyday promises to become an influential work in both literary and art historical studies."
---Aviva Briefel, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
