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Building on recent specialised studies on the critique of illustration in individual authors or periods, this article develops a new methodology for a large comparative study of the critique of literary illustration. Notably, this article argues for the benefits of developing a catalogue of basic arguments levelled against the pictorial illustration of literary texts. By distinguishing between these arguments and by tracing these arguments throughout history, we stand to gain new insights into not only the history of literary illustration but also into broader trends in literary and cultural history, which inform the critique of illustration. These general remarks are further developed through exemplary analyses of three prominent criticisms of illustration from the nineteenth century as well of their varying legacies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: illustrations limit the reader's imagination; illustrations are merely included for commercial gain; and illustrations limit intellectual pursuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many histories of nineteenth-century literature of the Low Countries, only a handful of authors are associated with emerging genres of regional fiction such as the village tale. In view of the immense popularity of regional literature, these histories overlook a large part of the literary field. This article aims to provide complementary perspectives by looking at how nineteenth-century Dutch and Flemish regional literature was framed and understood in contemporary reception, by systematically tracing all mentions of other artists and authors in reviews of selected authors. This has resulted in a 'co-mention network', revealing associations contemporary reviewers made between Dutch and Flemish regionalist writers and other cultural figures. This network functions as a starting point for investigating the impact of genre, gender and nationality on associations between authors, while also attending to which connections are not made, and which authors are left out of dominant narratives. Network analysis suggests that genre boundaries were fluid, and that numerous transnational authors were associated with Dutch and Flemish regionalists. At times nuancing or amending existing accounts of regionalism in literary histories, this article is also a tentative investigation of processes of canon-formation more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of French translations of Mao's canonical works in the 1950s and 1960s sparked interest among French-left intellectuals. This paper investigates Rancière's appropriation and reinvention of Mao's thinking as an illustration of the exchange between Maoism and contemporary French left-wing theories on literature and art. First, drawing on Mao's "mass line," Rancière values the autonomy of the people rather than the leadership of the Althusserian intellectual elites. Second, Rancière's "part of those that have no part" differs from Mao's "the people" in the concept's scope and in how they are transformed into political subjects. Third, deeply indebted to Mao's "the people's literature and art" that underscores the centrality of ordinary people and their lives, Rancière's theory of politics of literature unleashes the liberating force of art and literature for the sensible of ordinary people, and calls for overthrowing the hierarchy of class politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Allgemeines Historisches Taschenbuch, oder Abriss der merkwürdigsten neuen Welt-Begebenheiten (General Historical Pocketbook, or Outline of the most remarkable new world events), published in Berlin in 1784 and supported by the Academy of Arts, contained one of the most important contemporary accounts of the North American Revolution, titled Geschichte der Revolution von Nord-Amerika (History of the North American Revolution) by Matthias Christian Sprengel, professor at Göttingen University. It further contained influential illustrations, among them twelve engravings designed by Academy member Daniel Chodowiecki, each depicting a key motif from the American struggle for independence and its outcome. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), an original copy of the pocket book with the Geschichte der Revolution has been preserved, and it is unique in that eleven drawings by Johann Heinrich Ramberg are glued in in addition to the original plates. Ramberg of Hanover was to follow Chodowiecki as the most prolific artist in German book illustration. Several of the drawings are dated 1786 or 1787, when the young Ramberg was a fellow at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, studying under the American history painter Benjamin West. These drawings are examined and published in their entirety here for the first time. An article published in Amerikastudien in 1978 first mentioned the drawings in the Metropolitan Museum and their obvious connection to the Chodowiecki prints, stating they posed a "puzzling iconographic problem" because the German artist in London appeared to change the viewpoint in at least one case. This article follows up on Jantz's observation. It examines how Chodowiecki's designs all show the perspective of the British or share a "neutral" outsider perspective. I argue that in nearly all cases, Ramberg moves the observer closer to the action, takes on the perspective of the Americans or one sympathetic to them, shows more emotion and movement than Chodowiecki, and thus invites an emotional reaction from the viewer. The question of whether Ramberg planned publication, though, remains unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some of the dynamics related to ekphrasis between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, focusing particularly on the often problematic, but always fruitful, interplay between the object and its description. My interest lies, more specifically, in what has often been called 'reverse ekphrasis', that is, the process through which the figurative arts engage in producing an equivalent of the verbal text, instead of the other way around. The analysis is structured around a series of case studies related to King Solomon and to the rich artistic patronage attributed to him by the Bible—a patronage that not only was exploited for centuries to create a powerful imagery around kingship, but also had a fruitful effect on the creation of artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab uprisings ushered an unrealistic level of euphoria across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); however, ten years on, most of the same dictatorships continue to rule and reactionary forces have only become more powerful. For many, the Arab street has become a more dangerous, even dystopic, place. With democracy curtailed and economic prosperity an unlikely possibility in the near future, some writers and artists in the MENA region are turning away from the nightmares of the present towards the futuristic lands of science fiction and fantasy, imaginary places where they have the freedom to openly reflect upon their predicament. Indeed, it is reported that dystopian literature in Arabic fiction has proliferated in recent years. The same trend can be seen in art: a 2016 exhibition in London billed itself as 'a dazzling journey into the future of Palestine—through both utopian and dystopian visions of what lies ahead'. In this article, I first briefly detail the recent oppression in Egypt and Palestine—what I call the dystopian present—including against artists and writers. I then look at the contemporary role of art and literature as social critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article establishes the works of women poets in the UK, especially those of non-white and mixed-race ancestries, as major players in poetic ekphrasis. Ekphrasis has been defined as 'the verbal representation of a visual representation' (Heffernan 3). Building on the critical studies of the ekphrases by twentieth-century women poets, this article recognizes the increasingly multicultural landscape of contemporary British ekphrastic poetry and engages in detailed studies of the ekphrastic poems from Grace Nichols's Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and Pascale Petit's What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (2010). The two case studies demonstrate how women poets of non-white and mixed-race ancestries return to engaging with art from a diasporic perspective or art from a foreign culture and to exploring the potential and limits of art as a life-, self- and trauma-transmuting agent. The article simultaneously reveals the diverse purposes of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry, as seen in the ekphrastic practices of Nichols, Petit and other women poets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Gert Schiff's magisterial publication of 1973 on Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), a print identified as representing the enslaved prince Oroonoko has raised unsettling questions about the complex implication of even liberal, abolitionist eighteenth-century artists and intellectuals in the world system of enslaved labor. But problems of fit with Thomas Southerne's 1695 play Oroonoko, popular throughout the eighteenth century, and with Aphra Behn's 1688 eponymous novel demand a reattribution, placing the print in a debate about not only slavery in the Americas but also race, classicism, and the merits of Indigenous and European civilization in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how author's approach to visual studies has been shaped like international relations scholars in the boundaries of the academic discipline with an effort to make visually a legitimate topic of scholarly inquiry. Topics include Social scientific methods where the preferred and often sanctioned approach; and insight from art and literature in global politics that are sanctioned by social scientific conventions from the impact of popular culture on political perceptions.

While the idea of exemplification or role-modelling as a means to the education of moral character and virtue is of ancient pedigree—traceable at least to Aristotle's ethics—the influence of personal example is clearly not unproblematic since individuals may be admired or imitated for less than morally admirable qualities. However, personal exemplification is evidently not the only route to moral exemplification, insofar as readers may find much to admire or emulate in the characters of literary or other artworks which may allow for some critical distance between admired and admirers. This article is concerned with exploring the potential for moral exemplification of literature and arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this note is to derive simple testing procedures for ANOVA under heteroscedasticity by a single approach that are equivalent to the prior art in the literature obtained by the Parametric Bootstrap and the Generalized Fiducial approach. By similar approach, researchers are encouraged to derive generalized tests in other applications, as alternative to parametric bootstrap tests and fiducial tests, including ANCOVA and MANOVA under heteroscedasticity, especially in Mixed Model applications, where the bootstrap approach fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Postcolonial Asylum, David Farrier explains why refugee experiences have been considered as a "scandal" for postcolonial studies, but also how they have become central to the field, insofar as they reflect the violence and unevenness of the current world order. If geography, political philosophy and law have analysed current "refugee crises", the literature and arts produced by or about forcefully displaced people have remained understudied. This article affirms that postcolonial theory, precisely because of its situation at the crossroads between social sciences and humanities, offers a unique platform from where to study refugee literature and arts. It also argues that its enduring impact lies in its extraterritoriality, i.e. its capacity to interrogate dominant literary histories defined along national borders, frustrate unilingual visions of national languages and individual conceptions of authorship, and inspire seminal "turbulence" in artistic, critical, and academic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several prominent consumer researchers have advocated the analysis of works of literature and art. Pathbreaking through these studies have proved, they are characterized by their focus on élite rather than popular literary forms. This paper extends the so-called "marketing in Shakespeare" approach to works of romantic fiction, many of which are renowned for their brand namedropping. A content analysis of brand names in two "sex 'n' shopping" novels is undertaken and comparisons are made with an earlier study of mainstream popular fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article derives part of its title—“Dictionary of Art”—from a description of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) afforded by Frank O’Hara’s friend, the artist Jane Freilicher. The epithet is well suited to O’Hara’s poetry, which not only is indebted to the works on display at that museum (where O’Hara worked) but also evinces an encyclopedic range of art through its frequent ekphrasis. In particular, this article restores a group of early poems, written between 1952 and 1957, to their ekphrastic origins. Unlike the well-known ekphrastic works in O’Hara’s œuvre, these poems have not been examined through this lens, as the artworks on which they meditate are designated in manuscript form but relegated to endnotes in the Collected Works and therefore routinely overlooked. Yet these poems, as this article clarifies, importantly challenge the traditionally inimical relationship between word and image by making the visual and verbal arts interdependent. Moreover, the practice of obscuring or revealing these works’ ekphrastic designations alters their reception, forcing us to reconsider how they are anthologized, taught, and discussed. Finally, through their inter-artistic considerations, these poems anticipate a view of art that underlies the many literal collaborations O’Hara would soon go on to undertake in his career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might writing be a performative archaeology? First, go down into the depths of the earth. Into the chthonic materiality that is archaeology's domain. Here can be found the traditional notions of darkness, burial, hiddenness, and exhumations from the crypt. Then things hidden in the dark appear. Ancient stone tablets are examined as an example of a textual crypt, made even more resonant when they are spell tablets; an enfolding of embodiment and exposition, in a performative intersection of site, matter and inscription. Spell casting vacillates between writing archaeology, and breath, as seen Artaud's spell works, that burn holes in the gap between sign and signifier; inside and outside; body and material support, as demonic marker. Looking at the crypt structure and its relation to writing, extending its role from chthonic charnel house to generative transmitter, the crypt will be seen to be a method that allows writing to enact this rift, unearthing never-present psychic sediments of the past, and their invocation into the air to disrupt the archive – that is, a magic performative writing that invokes flickering suspension of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A thorough examination of Jay to Bee: Janet Frame's Letters to William Theophilus Brown (2016), which provides a selection of Janet Frame's letters to her American painter friend Bill Brown, confirms her propensity for viewing her own life-writing primarily as an instrument of fictionalization. Frame's letters should then not be considered as a mere textual adjunct documenting a period in her life or a phase in her poetics. By dint of actually inventing, or imaginatively adding to, the story of her friendship with Brown, she constructed a complex corpus which proves formally and thematically consistent with the novels of her middle to late period. This is where she first explored intuited links between the arts of painting and fiction, which would lead to the enhanced metafictional self-consciousness characteristic of her latest novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gruppo 70 was an Italian neo-avant-gardist group of artists and critics, including Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, Lucia Marcucci, Luciano Ori, Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Chiari, Emilio Isgrò, Roberto Malquori, and Michele Perfetti, which opened up the genre of poetry to the performative and visual languages of mass communication. In this article we focus on some of the key debates revolving around the Gruppo 70, in order to explore what form of impegno developed in their theoretical writings and creative interventions, and how this impegno was negotiated in the works of artists such as Lamberto Pignotti and Ketty La Rocca in particular. More specifically, we are concerned to investigate the interconnections between impegno, media and gender in the shift from theory – the theory of impegno was principally developed by male artists and critics – to artistic practice, a field in which, as we shall see, the work of female artists developed a strong critique of mass society and technological culture but remained largely marginalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a trend in some British contemporary art towards ‘fictioning’, when this names not only the blurring of the reality/fiction boundary, but also, more generally, the material instantiation – or performance – of fictions within the real. It attends to three practices of this fiction as mode of existence: sequencing and nesting (Mike Nelson); the deployment ‘fabulous images’ and intercessors (Brian Catling); and more occult technologies and an idea of the ‘invented life’ (Bonnie Camplin). The article also attends to the mythopoetic or ‘world-making’ aspect of these practices and the way this can involve recourse to other times, past and future. Mythopoesis also involves a sense of collective enunciation and, with that, a concomitant disruption of the more dominant fiction of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The silence of Petrarch’s picture of Laura lamented in poem 78 is normally viewed as an argument for the superiority of poetry over painting. It is true that in this poem the image of Laura seems to listen but not to speak, whereas, in other poems, the verbal representation of the woman speaks freely. This article argues that Petrarch’s writings about images employ fragile silences for carefully deliberated expressive purposes. It is shown that attention to questions of sound in vivid description was something that Petrarch learned from Quintilian. He would also have noted the sounds reported in the ekphrases of Homer, Virgil, and Catullus. Dante and Petrarch used the subjunctive in their writings on vivid images to convey the idea that pictures only seemed like they could speak. The almost-speaking topos was taken up by later humanist poets. The article examines the different configurations of verbal and visual description and argues that potential discrepancies between them were resolved using the imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, questions of public education in both environmental issues and science, more broadly, are examined in an effort to respond to Richard Aldrich’s call for historians of education to use their skills and understanding both to inform the present and to shape a more enlightened future. In particular, the lives and work of three women in science – Marianne North, Rachel Carson and Alice Stewart – are investigated through their art, writings and actions and through autobiographical and biographical material. The focus is on issues of natural history, the environment and the use and misuse of technology arising from their scientific work. In each case, how far they challenged the scientific thinking of their day or extended public understanding is explored while consideration is also made of how they were educated for their scientific careers, what impediments they faced and how far and in what ways they overcame them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When asked about the genesis of her texts, Sylvie Germain states that when an image, a vision, a dream haunt and obsess her so, they become literary matter—namely tales. Similarly, autonomous forms and figures impose themselves and inhabit her works, shape-shifting into free-floating characters. Hence the strange and poetic nature of her fiction, even when her stories allude to horrific events or tragic situations.La Pleurante des rues de Prague(1992), a superb allegory of the incommensurable dolor suffered by humankind, is such a text. The giant figure who roams Germain's pages, carrying in the folds of her frock every tear, every lament, every torment born of human suffering, bears an implacable testimony to the facility with which man forgets and repeats the abominable evils of History. She mirrors Czech artist Anna Chromý’s formidable sculpture “The Cloak of Conscience,” an empty garment carved out of a block of Carrara marble to form a chapel of sorts in which to meditate on God's silence as regards the world's mystery and mankind's misery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the seventeenth-century dictionary The Gate of Languages Unlocked, Johann Comenius describes “Gravers cutting most curious little images in brass, and imprinting them on paper,” under a section called “The Delights of the Eyes.” These curious shapes, engraved on brass or copper plates, formed a new illustration technique in seventeenth-century prints. Engravings were reproduced in print through the duplication and reversal of their visual forms. In Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1633) and political pamphlets, a pattern of replication and inversion appears throughout their poetic texts, engraved illustrations, and philosophical concerns. This pattern portrays the visual reading process as unsettled. In a culture where visual species, or replicas of images and objects, were thought potentially to mediate and transform what was seen, where diabolical influences interfered with the human senses, and where new visual marvels in astronomy and aesthetics were displayed and contested, visual observation was an ambivalent sensation that could alternately divine truths and deceive observers. This article will explore Quarles’s and his collaborator William Marshall’s use of rhetorical tropes, such as chiasmus, paradox, and mimesis, and references to visual technologies, such as glass prisms, “fool’s paradises,” optical glasses, and telescopes, as well as engraving itself, to interrogate vision in the context of the popular illustrated print. In the works of Quarles, these crises and marvels of visual culture create a sense of duplicity, as readers become lured by sensual visions and optical illusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While scholars have begun to examine the potent visual dimensions of the inscribed word in antiquity, texts written onto smaller objects have yet to receive the same amount of attention. This article examines a poem composed by the fifth-century Christian author Sidonius Apollinaris, which its author states is to be written onto a silver bowl in the shape of a shell. While the bowl does not survive, and may never have existed, the poem and its frame within a letter (written by Sidonius to his friend Evodius) force readers to reconsider the flexibility of the ancient relationship between word, image, and object. The epigram creates a verbal–visual icon of its intended recipient, the Visigothic Queen Ragnahild, as a rival to the goddess Venus, but also challenges the queen and other readers. Comparing himself to a silversmith, Sidonius straddles word and image, using the rhetorical techniques of ekphrasis to invite readers to ruminate on the roles of the visual and the verbal—the appearance of the bowl, and the queen’s own appearance, all communicated via text—and on the physical, material, and intermedial modes in which different types of texts were meant to be read. By reading the text of the poem in its multiple contexts—in Sidonius’s letter, on the silver bowl, and in the minds of readers—this article teases out the implications of the visual dimensions of verbal texts in the period, as well as the striking fluidity with which such texts were endowed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If Édouard Glissant devised the concept of Tout-Monde (Whole-World), he also cultivated a Tout-Art (Whole-Art). Glissant's aesthetic practice and philosophy consists in highlighting connections between artistic production in geographically discrete parts of the world; in encouraging mixed media creations and performances; in establishing friendships between the critic and the artist; and in relinquishing human production to the agency of plants or water. Loichot argues that this form of art shaped by Glissant's philosophy of Relation aids to memorialize and render sacred unspeakable treatments of human beings in the slave trade or in the disaster of hurricane Katrina. The ceramicists, painters, musicians, sculptors, novelists, and film-makers Victor Anicet, Federica Bertelli, Bës, Fabienne Kanor, Federica Matta, Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Piersy Roos, Sylvie Séma, Jason de Caires Taylor, and Laurent Valère cited in this essay take part in this venture of solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is the function of poetry? Should it respond to the issues of the day, or is it in thrall to the depths, called only to speak for the mysteries? These questions bedevil the poet as she struggles with a disturbing dream. She finds herself in Istanbul, a city she's never visited in waking life. The dream gives her the repugnant role of invader, a functionary of the patriarchy—compelled by unseen forces to take over an Ottoman-era mansion belonging to a young woman of distinguished family. The poet has no idea what to make of all this. The dream demands a poem. The poem demands a meander through Turkish literature. It is a difficult poem, demanding many revisions that require night vision—predawn wrestlings with the poem's essential nature. As the poem begins to quicken, to come to life, it reveals itself as both a messenger from the “Spirit of the Times,” full of refugees, wars, terror, and a messenger from the “Spirit of the Depths,” full of the ancient goddess, unearthed at Çatal Hüyük in Turkey by Marija Gimbutas; it is both a political poem and a spiritual poem. And even after the poem gets its name, “Some Questions for the Dream Maker,” feels complete to the poet, has gone out into the world and been published (twice), it demands yet one thing more—this essay—its creation story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses morphemic suffixes 'ish' and 'ick', their relation and usage in Minnesota. The German influence on English in Minnesota and formulation of literary art in Marxian corpus has been presented. The challenges to historiography while dealing with the work of art, textualization of history and objects of attention becoming the object of reading has been emphasized. It is also suggested that the usage of 'ish' appears more in decisive paragraphs.

This article offers a critical apparatus for analyzing a specific pictorial form, the historiated initial, found in several illustrated copies of the late medieval health guide known as theRégime du corps. In many of these initials, a single moment has been selected to represent a corresponding textual chapter; often the scene depicted is a particularly unresolved moment in the process of treatment. I propose that these initials functioned as open-ended episodes, freeze-framed moments in which the results of the treatment depicted are intentionally made unclear. This specific form of the historiated initial, which is monoscenic rather than one in a series of images, may initially seem static, but it actually creates an unexpected context for narrative potentiality through in-progress scenes that remain open to the viewer’s resolution. The users of these household health guides were uniquely positioned to follow the guidance of the manuscript’s didactic text while imagining the various possibilities or endings suggested in the unresolved scenes of the initials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is concerned with the relationship between a fictional map and a fictional text and the way in which we understand and interpret that relationship. It explores visual–verbal relations (between map and text) through meaningful elements relating to the juxtaposition of these two forms within the covers of a book. Its primary interest is in determining the nature of the dynamic between map and text, arguing for a more integrated model of interpretation. The first part of the article, therefore, draws upon Gèrard Genette’s account of the paratext in order to consider to what extent the fictional map functions in a paratextual role. The article then explores the spatial and material relationship between map and text by applying Genette’s four key paratextual aspects—location, temporality, communication and function—to an analysis of the fictional map, with particular attention paid to two examples from Arthur Ransome and J. R. R. Tolkien. The article then reflects on the strengths and limits of this approach and incorporates the alternative offered by W. J. T. Mitchell’s formulation of the ‘imagetext’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the publishing project of French writer and book producer Pierre Lecuire (1922–2013), a key figure in the French world of artists’ books, with a particular focus on his collaborations with artist Nicolas de Staël that were never realized in the form initially envisaged for them. It examines, first, Lecuire’s well-established interest in the materiality of the book form through exquisitely produced collaborations with such artists as Zao Wou-Ki and Geneviève Asse, and the suggestion that he aspired to an ‘ideal’ book that would be experienced through all the senses rather than simply read. However, the article goes on to argue that this emphasis on the material is, rather, inseparable from the virtual once unfinished and absent books and associated documents also created by Lecuire are taken into account. With de Staël, for instance, he planned to stage a series of ephemeralBallets-Minute, a project that was not achieved, but they did lead to two associated books. Lecuire presents the documents as relics of unrealized projects, thereby foregrounding the process of production and controlling the narrative of his own contributions. The article concludes that the unfinished project and the provisional fragment play an essential role in Lecuire’s work, which places it within a broader Modernist context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the frequently overlooked poetry of Melvin Tolson to explore how Harlem Renaissance-era poetry contends with visual technological race bias. Building on cultural criticism from bell hooks and Richard Dyer, it looks beyond the Jazz movement to consider how Tolson’s engagement with older visual forms provides a more complete picture of the 1920s’ and 1930s’ cultural moment. In two poetry collections, Tolson turns to visual forms, the chiaroscuro technique in painting and the woodcut print, to emphasize the pervasive nature of racial bias. This article recontextualizes Tolson’s work within 1920s’ and 1930s’ graphic arts culture: Aaron Douglas, Rockwell Kent, and others, to assert a poetics of hybridity between high and low, modern and vernacular, and visual and literary production. Tolson’s appeals to visual forms structure subsections of poems to envision innovative collaboration predicated on strong African American artistic achievement and self-assertion through visual–poetic forms like silhouettes, etchings, and pastels. Tolson’s manuscripts persist as counter-galleries against stereotypical images of African Americans that overwhelmed more dominant visual forms like photography and painting, and remind us that visualization can resist as well as subjugate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘In Memory of My Feelings’ is widely regarded as one of Frank O’Hara‘s seminal works, but can we trust its finale? This article reads the conclusion of the poem in the light of the art-historical term ‘figura serpentinata’. By doing so, we can learn something about the translation of formal tropes across aesthetic mediums (sculpture, painting, poetry), and disclose a queer genealogy within the development of the history of art. It includes readings of ancient statuary (including the Laocoön and His Sons, the Belvedere Torso and the Discobolus) and Roman rhetoric (Quintilian) to trace the recovery of the figura serpentinata from interwoven aesthetic and rhetorical traditions during the Renaissance (Michelangelo Buonarroti) and the Enlightenment (Johann Joachim Winckelmann). The article also theorizes Johann Gottfried Herder’s proto-phenomenological aesthetics as they prepare an argument for statuary as the elegiac accretion of earlier erotic desire. It describes the figure of the serpent and provides one final example contemporary to O’Hara in which the representation of the figura serpentinata is replaced by its performance in the painting of the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. It concludes with some comments on the turn between figuration in representation, abstraction and rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The principal goal of this article is to determine how closely Robert Rauschenberg engaged with the Inferno to create modern images that make visible Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poetry. The first part explores the physical and visual nature of the drawings; the second provides a context in Rauschenberg’s career during the early 1950s; the third provides an account of the production of the illustrations, drawing on the application for a fellowship that Rauschenberg made in 1958 to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the fourth reviews the early reception of the drawings, focusing on papers written by both John Cage and Dore Ashton; the fifth considers later scholarship by Laura Auricchio, Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Crow, and Hiroko Ikegami; and the sixth considers Rauschenberg’s drawings in relation to manuscript illuminations made by Sandro Botticelli in the fifteenth century. The remainder of the article identifies a number of images that Rauschenberg appropriated from the contemporary print media and considers specifically how he used them to illustrate Dante’s text. The paper concludes that Rauschenberg did indeed adhere closely to Dante’s text while also making “mute poetry” in a modern idiom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Francis Slade's spoken words and his writings are concrete and realistic: in their arresting formulations, their close reading and juxtaposition of texts, their use of literature and art, their insights into classical political philosophy, and their understanding of Christian faith. This article illustrates these features by examining three contrasts he develops in his work. First, the distinction between ends and purposes helps recover the classical significance oftelos, which was done away with in modernity and has been lost to contemporary thought and culture. Second, Slade contrasts the premodern city, where political life naturally emerges in several kinds of communities in accord with the ends of human nature, with the modern state, which has been constructed by thought from “deracinated individuals” organized into a “depoliticized society” and governed by “decontextualized rule.” Third, Slade shows how Augustine's reevaluation of human experience and Greek thought in the light of Christian revelation differs from Machiavelli's rejection of classical and Christian thought in favor of effective rationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author describes an action research project she carried out in order to look at the possible role of reading and literature in helping high-school art students enhance their ability to critically understand art and to create art based on a critical, thematic intention rather than simply visual representation. The approach, called Words Start Art (WSA), involved having students select a favorite quotation, poem, or other literary piece which the class then shared and discussed with the aim of applying higher-order thinking skills to developing an idea for an artwork inspired by a quote. Topics include students’ statements about their artworks and the theories of early 20th-century psychologist Lev Vygotsky on the relationship between language and thought.

Triumphal entries of the 16th and 17th centuries were composed of triumphal processions incorporating grand ephemeral monuments. At the bottom of these at eye level it was common to find emblems. While the form and nature of the triumphal procession, by moving from one monument to the next along the assigned route, produced a ‘progressive viewing experience’, the emblems, in stark contrast, compelled the viewer to take a pause in order to decode their meaning, a process that involved careful analysis and reflection. The use of emblems seems thus to represent a distinct interest and disposition, which appears to contradict the dynamic nature of the triumphal procession. This article explores the use of emblems by considering them as ‘visual footnotes’, hallmarks of scholars and literati. Consistent with early modern textual and literary practice, the analysis of the emblems in relation to the pageant as a whole, and especially of the ephemeral artistic monuments, allows the identification of the humanistic ‘universal’ discourse to emerge from the local and civic ad-hoc arguments. In addition, similarly to modern academic footnotes, they were addressed and aimed to benefit the ‘reading’ procedure by exposing the sources, justifications and enhancement of what was established by the main imagery, albeit directed at a selected few — the literati. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘What is a Poem?’ Herbert Read asked at the close of his final volume of poetry,Collected Poems(1966). This question was to preside over the later years of his career as both a poet and a critic, and to reach its most intriguing conclusion in his often-overlooked poetry collection ‘Vocal Avowals’. First printed in 1959 inEncounter, Read revisited this sequence throughout the final decade of his life, revised and reprinted for the 1962 collectionWorte sagen aus, and then as the final section in Read’sCollected Poems. Misidentified by critics as the invention of a ‘supremely subjective romanticism’, these poems were composed at a moment of great philosophical curiosity and artistic ambition. Through Read’s contribution to an evolving ‘language of non-vocal signs’, his vocalizations on behalf of abstract art and his vital and incessant experiment in the realm between poetry and painting, these poems were to contribute to a stirring of the ‘drift’ of modern poetry in post-war Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1907 the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton wrote La vie meurtrière(The Murderous Life), a mock-autobiographical novel with striking tropological connections to his fin-de-siècle prints. An examination of those connections reveals that Vallotton developed a unique visual language in both image and text for the relation between sight and social responsibility. The Paris crowd scenes that first established his artistic reputation attest to the largely unrecognized significance of the gawker (le badaud) as a modern type, a figure for the attractions and fraught ethics of urban spectatorship that is distinct from the far more studiedflâneur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented that discusses the role of the journal in the Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) series from the publisher Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, noting issue articles on philosophy Luce Irigaray, art and literature, and aesthetics in university buildings.

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense ofaware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of theukiyo-e‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back toawaresensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series ofHyakuninisshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustainawarethemes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article brings together and compares my own artistic practice of drawing/painting and the eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy. In both cases, there is a free play of lines, textual or graphic, which sets ‘all things out of rule’. A whole typology of lines is woven throughout Sterne’s text and reappears, alter-inscribed, in the artworks. The article presents an account of these lines: rectilinear, hylomorphic, fractal and nomadic, as well as the line of incision (or the cut). Each is explored as a specific mode of line with differing effects. To follow these lines is to enter a world of material expressivity, to be exposed to an ontology of becoming and change, of flows and transformations, that overturns the traditional ontology of being and stable identity. Sterne’s use of wild digression, doodles and graphisms, establishes certain proximity between writing and drawing. Both may be seen as types of ‘figured metaphysics’ and as ways of bringing something new into the world. The article concludes with some philosophical observations on the strange event of drawing a line, with reference to the work of Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on understanding poetics as a creative practice, drawing from the work of key mid-twentieth century and contemporary poets. It attempts to align a poetics of writing with a poetics of dance, suggesting that both poetry and dance work in excess of the functions of language. The significance of practice in an approach to poetics is discussed, with an emphasis on the role of embodiment and performance.

“Tongues of glaciers” explores the creative collaboration of visual artist Roni Horn and poet Anne Carson around Horn’s acclaimed Vatnasafn/Library of Water (2007), an installation sited in a former community library in western Iceland. In twenty-four floor-to-ceiling transparent glass columns, Horn displays and archives water in which the telluric and linguistic sediment of glaciers has been deposited. Carson and her husband, Robert Currie, wrote the poem “Wildly Constant” here when Carson was writer in residence in 2009. A homage to and meditation on the Library of Water that reverberates through many other poetic and creative collaborations in subsequent years — including musical performances — the poem is the occasion for an examination of the complex, generative interplay of word and image. The authors’ analysis details the intricate formal interweaving of poem and visual artwork, the inspirations and reference points for both art forms — including the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Anna Freud, Marcel Proust, and especially earth artist Robert Smithson’s essays. Their reading of Horn’s and Carson’s works seeks to understand their extended conception of “writing” and “drawing,” the vagaries of gender, and the ecology of water. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“Propaganda by Monuments” was published inStaffridermagazine in 1992, and is the first example of Ivan Vladislavić’s experiments with collage techniques, an interest he has sustained through to his recent work inThe Loss Library and Other Stories(2011). From “Propaganda” toThe Loss Library’s “The Cold Storage Club,” there is a shift in how he uses collage, from emphasizing juxtaposition to foregrounding absence. Vladislavić’s texts and the images beside which they are published have become increasingly structured around non-presence. This change is most apparent when the various contexts of these texts’ publication are taken into account. If these multiple editions are read with collage in mind, it becomes possible to consider Vladislavić’s whole oeuvre as a collaborative collage of sorts, which uses mixed media in a large-scale project of marking a particular historical moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The primary quest of anthropological man in the XIXth century revolves around the problematics of origination, in particular in the domain of the aesthetic. We propose to examine how theWeltanschauungof an epoch obsessed with the problematics of origination is manifest in the pathological probing of the ontogenetic status of the romantic aesthetic artefact in the Balzacian and Baudelairian corpus. In tracing the aesthetic cartography subtending the creation of the poetic artefact we shall probe the chthonic substratum of romantic art, understood in terms of the systolic and diastolic rhythms of self-creation and self-destruction postulated by Friedrich Schlegel in the concept of Romantic Irony. Through a microanalysis of the crisis of self-representation encapsulated in the myth of poetic origination as it is articulated in the phenomenological grounding of the romantic aesthetic artefact, we propose to investigate the aesthetics of de-composition embedded in romantic art, or to be more precise, the subversion of the romantic aesthetic object disfigured by the visceral corruption operated by the dissolving powers of irony eating away at the core of the romantic text. In short, the subject of our discourse is the incorrigibleangstingrained in the romantic aesthetic artefact, the aetiology of which may be traced to the pathogenic de-composition symptomatic of the iterative suicide of romantic art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between literary works and the translations and illustrations that they inspire is commonly expressed in hierarchical terms, with translations and illustrations being subordinated to an archetypal standard text. Due to the historical hegemony of the written word in the literary context, illustrations tend to be relegated to the lower end of this spectrum. This article stresses that illustrations have no less literary and bibliographical significance than their written sources. In particular, it emphasises that illustrations can actively shape the textual trajectory of literary works by often exerting control over the texts of their translations as well as of their original versions. The article’s primary aim is to evaluate the impact of J. J. Grandville’s drawings ofGulliver’s Travels, first published in an 1838 French translation, on the fortune of Swift’s work. After examining some notable affinities between Swift’s and Grandville’s artistic inclinations, attention is paid to the relationship between Grandville’s illustrations and Gaetano Barbieri’s Italian translation of 1840. The analysis culminates in the observation of how the illustrations directly influenced the translator’s decision. Interesting parallels are then drawn between Barbieri’s translational behaviour and the composition of the British critical edition of William Cooke Taylor, also published in 1840. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For Your Immediate Attention: Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler In another essay, the author traced the impact of Gertrude Stein’s classic concept of repetition with a difference, or “insistence” as she called it, on composer John Cage and Andy Warhol. In this essay, he turns to Stein’s underlying strategies of attention as discussed in her popular memoirs and lectures and, moreover, as mediated by Warhol’s early mentor, curator Henry Geldzahler. First Stein’s celebrity-makingAutobiography of Alice B. Toklas(1933) is examined in relation to Warhol’sAutobiography of Alice B. Shoe(c.1955), which homed in on their mutual love of tittle-tattle as a common measure of queer sociality. Then Picasso’s (1906) and Warhol’s (1980) portraits of Stein are compared, focusing on how Warhol reframed queer identity through his broader use of institutional portraiture, including, as here, photo-ID cards. Next, attention turns to Stein’s characterological view of habits of attention (“bottom nature”), which Warhol brought to bear in hisScreen Tests(1964–66) and related works. Finally, the article concludes with Stein’s signature strategies of divided yet mutually reinforcing attention, the theme of “genius” with which she opened theAutobiography, which Warhol actualized in his diptych paintings since 1963, and his split-screen films since 1965. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tennyson composedIn Memoriambetween 1833 and 1849, a span bisected by Daguerre’s and Talbot’s nearly simultaneous claims to have invented a viable photographic process. Read in tandem with Barthes’sCamera Lucida, Tennyson’sIn Memoriamis seen as originating in what has been called “a desire for photography” and as, in itself, a kind of photographic negative, potentially capable of resuscitating Arthur Hallam’s body. Barthes’s text offers a way to think about Tennyson’s elegy, and vice versa, as both share a fascination with latency (what is latent in the textures of paper; in language; in the psychological self), as well as a compulsion to dovetail the material with the spiritual. A dialectical approach, juxtaposing meditations onCamera LucidaandIn Memoriamwithin a broader framework of photographic history, helps to illuminate elements that the two works share in common, such as a teasing account of the “blind field” of sexuality, and an investment in the materiality of art, the surfaces of paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]