Poetics of Sight

John Harvey is a literary critic and novelist. He is a Doctor of Letters of Cambridge University and a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he has lectured in the English Faculty since 1970. In 2000 he was appointed University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture. He is the author of Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators, Men in Black and The Story of Black.

• Contents: Sight, the Mind’s Eye and Art – Shakespeare Pictures – The Unequal Art of William Blake – Satire and Sight – Bleak House to Lighthouse: The Optics of the Novel – Metaphor and Modernism – A Note on the Pre-Raphaelites and Shakespeare’s Women.

«Anyone who reads this book will read differently afterwards.»(Jane Partner, Cambridge Quarterly, 4/2016)«I particularly liked Harvey’s ability to argue his case in lucid, elegant prose [...] and there’s his usual mastery of prose rhythm and the well-turned sentence to express his argument with considered authority. His scholarship is judiciously deployed. [...] I commend this book: it’ll change the way you read.» (Simon Lavery, Tredynas Days, 1 June 2015)«This book contains valuable insights into literary texts [...].»(Ivan Gaskell, Essays in Criticism, Vol. 67, No. 1/2017)«John Harvey’s The Poetics of Sight (2015) is an accomplished and lucid exploration of the multifaceted relationship between visual images and the written word.»(Jorge L. Contreras, PRS Review, Volume XXIV, Number 1/2016)