Description Before the Novel

In his "Narrate or Describe?" Georg Lukacs influentially defined narration and description in opposition to each other and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of the former. This course examines how writers working before the advent of the novel theorized and practiced the craft of description. To do so, we will survey a wide range of genres including ancient epic, Middle English narrative poetry and travel writing, and Renaissance ekphrasis and blazon, placed in conversation with recent scholarship on description, as well as classic works of narrative theory.