Publisher's Synopsis
In this book the author uses metaphors to rethink the relation between verbal and visual images and, in a broader sense, to examine the desire for personal fusion in friendship and love. Drawing upon a wide range of artistic and literary figures. Colley emphasizes the paradox that synthesis is possible only when space remains between the elements that seek to blend.;To reveal the intrinsic structure of methaphor, Colley turns first to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. Lear's limericks and drawings, in their tendency to link incongruous objects (carp/harp, hatchet/flea), remind the reader of the ever-present suitable and visible spaces within metaphor. By contrast, the metamorphoses described in Ovid and Dante illustrate a merging of words and images in which one form of expression entraps or misrepresents the other. Colley goes on to show how the dialogue between words and pictures becomes a shaping force in the work of Paul Klee; he fuses the two but also honours and sustains their differences.;For Gerard Manley Hopkins the interplay between words and images is crucial to a sense of personal integration. Hopkin's strong interest in cartographic perspective, evident in early sketches, caries over to a metaphor of "mapping" in his poems - an attention to defining points and boundaries that chart his course between the sensuous particulars of the natural landscape and a larger transcendent vision. Colley turns finally to the most compelling of the various struggles to create synthesis - the quest for personal fusion - and the role space plays in the experiences of separation, death, love and friendship.
