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Representations
Interdisciplinarity for the 21st century

Table of Contents

Vol. 15, Summer, 1986

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    Front Matter
    DOI: 10.2307/2928388
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    Back Matter
    DOI: 10.2307/2928395
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    Writing and Deference: The Politics of Literary Adulation
    Jeffrey Mehlman
    (pp. 1-14) DOI: 10.2307/2928389
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    Representing Grief: Emerson's "Experience"
    Sharon Cameron
    (pp. 15-41) DOI: 10.2307/2928390
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    Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity
    John Rajchman
    (pp. 42-56) DOI: 10.2307/2928391
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    "Secret" Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets
    Patricia Fumerton
    (pp. 57-97) DOI: 10.2307/2928392
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    Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Religious Discourse: The Case of the English Family of Love
    Janet E. Halley
    (pp. 98-120) DOI: 10.2307/2928393
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    The Family Pet
    Marc Shell
    (pp. 121-153) DOI: 10.2307/2928394
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Representations: 15
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Vigorously theoretical and highly readable, Representations is ranked in the top 10 journals on Cultural Studies
(Source: 2015 Web of Science Data).
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A Short History of the Picture as Box 

(Representations 141)

Art historian Amy Knight Powell details the genealogy of the box as a frame, a window, and a container in art. She writes:

In “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), Clement Greenberg compares the easel picture, disparagingly, to a box-like cavity cut into the wall. In this essay, I argue that late medieval panel paintings—which indeed often took the form of boxes—show Greenberg to be justified in making this comparison, if not in doing so disparagingly. But what Greenberg failed to fully acknowledge is that the easel picture had already long tried to escape this condition through the opening of the metaphor of the window. Failing to recognize this earlier effort to escape the material conditions of the box, many modernists and postmodernists, like Greenberg, attempting to move beyond the easel picture in the name of an art undivided from life, have unintentionally upheld the easel picture’s own escapist ideology.

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