Ruth Yeazell

My research and teaching focus on the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the history of gender and sexuality, and the relations of literature to the visual arts. As a teacher and critic, I am concerned with the way works of art both respond to and imaginatively transform their culture.

I also enjoy writing on a variety of literary and other topics for a wider public in the London Review of Books and elsewhere. Among my recent books, Art of the Everyday (2007) concerns seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a model for literary realism and includes chapters on Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy, and Proust.

Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (2015) asks how the naming of pictures has shaped their reception from the Renaissance to the present day.