"My Own Portrait in Writing"

I'd also like to see if I can't make my own portrait in writing. First I start by saying that to my mind the same person supplies material for very diverse portraits. -- Vincent van Gogh, Arles, 1888 This is an exciting and inspiring book: it is both intellectually ambitious and humanly challenging. Ideally, in my view, it could stimulate an effort to work towards a revised and reinvigorated curriculum with Van Gogh's letters being read alongside some of the writers the great artist most admired. -- Garry Watson, author of Opening Doors: Thought From (And Of) the Outside

An inspiring book that argues for Van Gogh's letters to be placed alongside the literary work of Blake and Eliot.

A reading of Van Gogh's collected correspondence by way of aset of ideas about dialogue and self-fashioning derived especially fromMikhail Bakhtin. Patrick Grant's central claim is that VanGogh's letters raise from within themselves questions and issuesto which they also respond dialogically, thereby thematizing theprocess of self-fashioning within their own discourse. The manner inwhich they do so is a marker of the specifically literary dimension ofVan Gogh's writing. Complementing Grant's earlier criticalanalysis, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study(AU Press, 2014), this study brings Van Gogh's collectedcorrespondence fully into the domain of modern literary studies, bothcritical and theoretical—as is long overdue.