Enduring Presence (Paperback)

"Long after his death in 1764, the artist William Hogarth is still our contemporary. Far from leading a confined existence in museums and academies, his legacy of vibrant images and provocative ideas remains a powerful source of inventiveness and inspiration for the artists of today, as once for those of yesterday, be it on page, stage, canvas or digital. After approaching the artist by way of his challenging aesthetic philosophy and his resistance to normative categories, this two-book set considers Hogarth's pioneering sense of performativity which made - and makes- him the interlocutor of actors and playwrights, from David Garrick to Bertolt Brecht or Nick Dear. While his conversations with film, television, graphic novel and modern art bear witness to the artist's almost prophetic use of images, the world of the novel, British and else, reveals unexpected areas of cross-pollination, particularly striking in the modernist age or present time narrative. Brimming as it is with energy, disorder, loss and empathy, Hogarth's contradictory universe of chaos and beauty is in tune with ours and resonates vividly with today's passions and struggles. The twenty-eight essays in this collection chart the teeming legacies of William Hogarth and explore the ways in which his works and ideas were - and still are - revisited and appropriated in the UK and across Europe in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hogarth is thus discovered as an unforgotten living presence, whose invigorating and challenging memory energizes multiple expressive forms, from drama to narrative, graphic novel or TV serials"--