This book offers a theory of ekphrasis-the literary description of an artwork-from the perspective of Visual Culture studies. A theory of ekphrasis must take into account not only the rhetorical strategies articulated in the description of artworks, but also the complex interplay that holds together the pictures that are described, the gazes that rest on them, and the dispositives that mediate them. It is therefore a matter of linking the study of the verbal rhetoric with the dynamics that are established between the author, the reader, and the...