"In this exploration of narrative, Alastair Fowler surveys picturing and perspective from the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth and draws analogies between literature and visual art. Many critics have assumed that narrative before the novel either looked forward to it or was medieval and allegorical, and compare the rise of the novel with the introduction of single-point perspective in drawing and painting. But continuous realism did not arise as soon as perspective was discovered. In actuality, a distinctive sort of Renaissance realism, with its own conventions, was practised from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century." "Renaissance Narrative in Literature and Visual Art shows that perspective only gradually came to dominate the western imagination and to become the default assumption for portrayal in the visual arts. The habit of an older, multipoint perspective long continued, accounting for 'anachronism', discontinuous realism, 'double time-schemes', and presentation of different moments as simultaneous - phenomena closely paralleled in narrative. In this history of the narrative imagination after single-point perspective, Alastair Fowler illuminates significant correlations between the depiction of objects and events in literature and art."--Jacket.