Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf : Modernism, Media and Emotion

Grøtta, Marit

Edinburgh University Press（2025/12発売）

Edinburgh University Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 224 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399526999
• DDC分類 809.93357

Full Description

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grotta discusses these writers' ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading Faces in the Age of Portrait Photography

1. Truth in Photographs: Marcel Proust

2. Power in Photographs: Franz Kafka

3. Sympathy in Photographs: Virginia Woolf

4. Conclusions: Living with Mediated Faces

Bibliography

Index