"A charming, even masterful footnote in the history of taste... Thoroughly researched, highly readable, and lavishly illustrated."
James Gardner, New York Sun "Yeazell looks to bring together both the high and the low, bridging Barrett Browning's gap between the Dutch and the Italian...Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel sheds new light on both the realist novel and ... Read moreDutch painting and covers both fields with the clear, warm glow of a fine Vermeer."
Bob Duggan, Art Blog by Bob "[A]s Ruth Bernard Yeazell makes abundantly clear in her study of the influence of Dutch painting on realist novels, it was the humanity, the ordinariness, the domesticity, of the work of a dozen or so Dutch (and Flemish) artists that proved both appealing and inspiring to Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy, and Proust
to name only the masterly writers whom Yeazell considers most essential and instructive... Yeazell documents her thesis with skill, erudition, and elegance."
Ed Minus, Sewanee Review "Yeazell's is an accomplished book, at once meticulous and highly readable, in which narratives of social meaning-making interact in complex, often uneasy ways with stories of conflicted inwardness."
Paul K. Saint-Amour, Novel "Yeazell's grasp over seventeenth-century Dutch painting is both thorough and nuanced, and the several very interesting connections that she makes between these paintings and realistic novels will have major implications for future work on literary realism."
Sambudha Sen, Victorian Studies "Yeazell's well-documented book (more than 500 endnotes and the opinions of many critics on this topic) offers strong evidence that beyond the visual imagery of nineteenth century English and French realist novelists there lies the minute pictorial syntax of the visual images of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter."
Camelia-Mihaela Cmeciu, European Legacy "There's something about the way Art of the Everyday has been written, which takes the reader right inside the canvas of Dutch painting. Upon reading two chapters in particular, 'Low Genre and High Theory' and 'Proust's Genre Painting,' one feels so immersed within the writing, that by proxy, the paintings themselves feel almost within reach. It's as if one is no longer reading about art, but rather, within the art itself... [L]et there be no doubt that Art of the Everyday is an august, and extraordinary contribution to the world of literary theory and the art-historical."
David Marx, Davidmarx.com "Art of the Everyday is one of those rare works that succeeds in comparing these media while doing full justice to their differences and complexities. Yeazell's close readings of nineteenth-century narratives are matched by her vivid interpretations of Dutch paintings, several of which are reproduced in stunning full-color plates. The book is useful not only for the argument it makes about the influence of Dutch painting on the nineteenth-century novel, but also for the high standard it sets for future interdisciplinary studies... Art of the Everyday promises to become an influential work in both literary and art historical studies."
Aviva Briefel, Nineteenth-Century Contexts Show Less