This collection of essays explores the relationship between art, literature and the stage in France and Belgium in the period 1830-1910. It is the first book to bring together scholarship on this neglected area of study and provides unique insights into current research within this rich interdisciplinary field. The rise in popular theatre, the beginnings of a ‘society of spectacle’, the emergence of the print media and the development of stage direction and set design, along with the crisis in pictorial and literary representation, created a dynamic cultural climate wherein the interface between writing, painting and dramatic representation thrived. The chapters in this volume chart different facets of this phenomenon: from the art of performing assumed by writers and the collaborations between artists and theatre directors to the theatrical motifs that infiltrated visual art and the increasingly ‘dramatized’ relationship between painting and spectator at the end of the century.

Claire Moran is Lecturer in French at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests lie in the relationship between art and literature in nineteenth-century France and Belgium.