Grasping Shadows The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film
by William Chapman Sharpe
Oxford University Press | September 2017 | ISBN-10: 0190675276 | True PDF | 440 pages | 195 mb

What's in a shadow? Menace, seduction, or salvation? Immaterial but profound, shadows lurk everywhere in literature and the visual arts, signifying everything from the treachery of appearances to the unfathomable power of God. From Plato to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Welles and Warhol, from Lord of the Rings to the latest video game, shadows act as central players in the drama of Western culture.
Yet because they work silently, artistic shadows often slip unnoticed past audiences and critics. Conceived as an accessible introduction to this elusive phenomenon, Grasping Shadows is the first book that offers a general theory of how all shadows function in texts and visual media. Arguing that shadow images take shape within a common cultural field where visual and verbal meanings overlap, William Sharpe ranges widely among classic and modern works, revealing the key motifs that link apparently disparate works such as those by Fra Angelico and James Joyce, Clementina Hawarden and Kara Walker, Charles Dickens and Kumi Yamashita.

About the Author
William Chapman Sharpe is a Professor of English at Barnard College. His previous books include New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950 (2008) and Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (1990).

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
List of Illustrations xii
Introduction: The Shadow Landscape 1
1 The Shadow Speaks 43
2 The Vital Shadow 81
3 The Look-Elsewhere Shadow 137
4 The Completing Shadow 183
5 The Independent Shadow 233
6 City of Shadows 295
Epilogue: Living with Shadows 335
Notes 347
Bibliography 395
Index 411
 
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