1. Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), line 762. Subsequent citations from this edition of Enoch Arden are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

2. In the more inclusive use of "ekphrasis" I am following, among others, Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). [BACK]

3. Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 284. [BACK]

4. Karl Kroeber, British Romantic Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 57. [BACK]

5. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 68. [BACK]

6. Rhoda L. Flaxman, Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1987), 76. [BACK]

7. Gerhard Joseph, "Tennyson's Optics: The Eagle's Gaze," PAMLA 92 (1977): 423. [BACK]

8. Peter Conrad, The Victorian Treasure-House (London: Collins, 1973), 76-77. [BACK]

9. See Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). [BACK]

10. "Walter Bagehot on Enoch Arden [1864]," in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 284 (date of publication bracketed in original). [BACK]

11. Joseph, "Tennyson's Optics," 425. There were, in fact, five illustrated editions of the poem, as well as several adaptations in other media including several popular stage plays and four early motion picture versions. For more information on adaptations, see P. G. Scott, Tennyson's "Enoch Arden": A Victorian Best-Seller (Lincoln, England: Tennyson Research Center, 1970), 19, 22, 23. [BACK]

12. Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971). [BACK]

13. "There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death—George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. . . . Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied" (William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968], 279). [BACK]

14. The representative character of this scene and its emblematic power are also suggested by an earlier use of it in "Two Voices." In that poem Tennyson presents the scene in reverse—a suicidal man opens his casement window and looks out on the freshness of dawn and the restorative sight of a family (described in similarly pictorial terms) going to church. [BACK]

15. Steiner, Colors of Rhetoric, 13-14. [BACK]

16. Krieger, Ekphrasis, xvii. [BACK]

17. W. J. T. Mitchell, "Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation," Art and Literature I, ed. Wendy Steiner, special issue of Poetics Today 10 (1989): 97. [BACK]

18. The quotation at the beginning of the sentence is from Ernest B. Gilman, "Interart Studies and the 'Imperialism' of Language," in Art and Literature I, ed. Steiner, 23. [BACK]

19. Kroeber, British Romantic Art, 1. [BACK]

20. Robert Pattison, Tennyson and Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 20. [BACK]

21. Michel Beaujour, "Some Paradoxes of Description," Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 33. [BACK]

22. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1909), 36:570. [BACK]

23. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 22. [BACK]

24. Scott, Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" (as in note 11), 19. [BACK]

25. The quotation at the beginning of the sentence is from Kroeber, British Romantic Art, 45. [BACK]

26. Alexander Ross, The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 27. [BACK]

27. See, for instance, Kroeber, 44. [BACK]

28. Beaujour, "Some Paradoxes of Description," 42. [BACK]

29. Ross, 23. [BACK]

30. Quoted in Philippe Hamon, "Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive," Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 10. [BACK]

31. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1969), 87. [BACK]

32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 100-01. [BACK]

33. Kroeber, 57. [BACK]