Cara Lewis's Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism proceeds from Virginia Woolf's ([1925] 1974: 173) provocation in her essay “Pictures” that a professor write a book called “The Loves of the Arts,” which “would be concerned with the flirtations between music, letters, sculpture, and architecture, and the effects that the arts have had upon each other throughout the ages.” Literature, Woolf claims, loves the hardest and widest of the arts, readily receiving impressions of sculpture, music, architecture, and painting throughout its history. Lewis situates literature's polyamory in modernism, asking, alongside Woolf, how it is that painting, sculpture, film, and photography make themselves felt in writing (2). Or, put a little differently, what does modernist literature love about visual and plastic art?
That modernist writing is in love with art is not questioned by Lewis or by Woolf. (We have plenty of books on that subject.) Rather, Lewis is interested...
