A thousand words

"A Thousand Words argues that there is such a thing as queer modernism, and that the (mostly) literary portrait - one of the more prominent forms of experimentalism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writing - functions as one of its most important erotically dynamic aesthetic mechanisms, one modeled on visual portraiture's relationships of looking between the artists, sitters, and spectators of paintings. Jaime Hovey looks at how the dynamic structure of visual portraiture was appropriated by modernist writers - including Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Colette, among others, who used the self-conscious literary portrait."--Jacket.