This collection of essays highlights the importance of water imagery in the work of the renowned nineteenth-century French female author George Sand. It provides a complex picture of the polyvalent presence of water in Sand’s work that encompasses life and death imagery, ecocriticism, fluid kinship, homosocial ties, and artistic creativity.

The author offers the first study of vision in the works of George Sand. He argues that, rather than rejecting reality in favour of the ideal, he integrates physical observation with internal forms of seeing such as the imagination and visionary insights.

Widely known for his novels El reino de este mundo and Los pasos perdidos, the Swiss-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier incorporated music in his fiction extensively, for instance in titles, in analogies with musical forms, in scenes depicting performances, recordings and broadcasts, and in characters’ discussions of musical issues. Chornik’s

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows

Books about Publications of the Modern Language Association of America