Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf

Download or read book Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf written by Marit Grotta and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.