Dream of the Moving Statue

Kenneth Gross is also the author of Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (1985), Shakespeare's Noise (2001), and Shylock is Shakespeare (forthcoming in 2006). He teaches English at the University of Rochester.

• ContentsIllustrationsPreface to the 2006 paperback editionPreface to the 1992 editionPart I1. Signs of Life: An Introduction2. The Death of Sculpture3. Eating the StatuePart II4. Idolomachia5. You May Touch This Statue6. Resisting PygmalionPart III7. Crossings8. The Space BetweenPart IV9. Talking with Statues10. The Thing Itself (Which Does Not Move)Coda: Ordinary StatuesNotesIndex

“Exploring a perennial fascination with the idea an animated statue and its converse (petrifaction of living individuals), Gross both delights and instructs the reader through an exploration of a quite astonishing number of significant examples that include poetry, film, drama, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, to say nothing of a few famous statues themselves. The style is inimitable: graceful, sophisticated, and seductive in the display of a sensibility that is at once both unique and accessible. The few pages of the preface alone give a hint of the riches that lie within, continually provoking the reader with the exhilarating experience of new insights into the workings of the imagination, the arousal of fear and desire, and the dangerously porous borderlines between the inanimate and the animate, the object and the subject, and finally, between death and life.”—Froma I. Zeitlin, Princeton University, author of Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greece