4A Literary Transcodifications/4
Session 4 – July 2, 15:30 – 17:30
The Art of Storytelling: Victorian poetry and Narrative Painting
Storytelling as a part of cultural reality locates itself wherever human communities form. Telling stories has long been recognized as an important part of communication, helping us to organize our thoughts and add meaning to our experiences so that they can be valuable to our lives. Storytelling serves the human need to satisfy curiosity, share experiences and pass on knowledge to a wider set of people. A plot is the framework on which any story rests. It is to translate the familiar, interesting and popular plots into paintings that the artists have often looked up to literature. In this interdisciplinary study of poetry and painting, I aim to interrogate the reasons why storytelling became an increasingly popular tool in the hands of Victorian poets and artists. Though there were many popular sources of stories and literary borrowings were a trend in those times; I shall restrict my study on the poetry of Keats and Tennyson that influenced the art works of Pre-Raphaelites and other artists of the period. My paper also intends to bring out the narrative themes such as religious stories, medieval folklore and morality tales that were popularised by Victorian poets and how a close kinship that developed between verbal and visual media was celebrated in the Pre-Raphaelite art.
Bio
Prachi Priyanka holds a doctorate degree in English literature. Her doctoral thesis is an illuminative study on the convergences between poetry and painting since the publication of G. E. Lessing’s Laocoon to the modern times. Her areas of interest include intertextuality and visual culture, Indian literature, Partition art and Diaspora studies. She writes in both English and Hindi and her research papers, poems and stories have been published in books, online journals, print magazines and short story anthologies. Her short stories collection ‘Thistle & Weeds’ was published in 2016. Her book ‘Caste, Class and Gender in Modern Indian Literature’ has been accepted for publication by Authorspress, New Delhi. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sharda University, India.