Ut pictura poesis: Ekphrasis, Genre Painting and Still Life in Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood and Alice Thompson

This article examines descriptions of persons, objects or scenes in three novels, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Thompson’s The Book Collector, which either straightforwardly or obliquely evoke various painting genres. I argue that although ekphrasis typically names nowadays “the verbal representation of visual representation” (James Heffernan), certain descriptions beg for a revision of the modern category of ekphrasis. My present corpus includes both ekphrases ‘proper’ and descriptions which evoke, without referring to, portraits, still lifes or genre paintings. I call the latter category readerly reverse ekphrasis, to emphasise the reader’s co-operation with the author – during the reading process – to determine, beyond the painterly affinities of the description, its structural makeup as ekphrasis.