Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf

Marit Grotta

Mar 2024 · Edinburgh University Press

About this ebook

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grotta discusses these writers' ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

About the author

Marit Grøtta is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and a number of articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Queneau and Agamben. Her research interests are nineteenth-century and modernist literature, visual culture, media philosophy and aesthetic theory.