Illustrated Texts 1:
Between High and Low: Exploring the
Boundaries of the Illustrated Text
Session Coordinator:
Keri A. Berg
This paper examines how the illustrations of several early
editions of Charlotte Temple both contributed to and capitalized on the avid
cult that grew up around Susanna Rowson's heroine. This melodramatic little
novel inspired a huge following of readers who were encouraged by the author to
read the book as a thinly-veiled account of the seduction, abandonment and
death of a real English girl. The "cult of
The cult of sentiment that surrounded Charlotte Temple drew much of its power from the near-religious identification between reader and character, and the illustrations support this readerly identification. Authors like Rowson, and the printers and booksellers who published and distributed Charlotte Temple and books like it, were happy to capitalize on the hunger for sentimental iconography in the rapidly expanding secular print marketplace. By exploring the circulation of the book as a material object, and considering the devotional engagement with the illustrated text by readers, we will see how the illustrations augment the affective force of the novel.
Spencer Keralis
From High to Low:
The Dissemination of the Illustrated Rubáiyát in
The phenomenon of Omariana—the cult of Omar Khayyám and his collection of poems called the Rubáiyát—pervaded American and British culture during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Publishers issued countless versions of the text, from deluxe manuscripts to pocket-sized, popular booklets. Illustrated editions of the Rubáiyát, designed by various artists, ran the gamut in terms of style, content, and relationship between text and image. Khayyám’s philosophic text, a fatalist and somewhat hedonist carpe diem, was alternately ignored or perverted by illustrators to suit their particular style, taste, agenda, or audience. While artists such as William Morris and Elihu Vedder created elaborate manuscripts to satisfy a more elite taste, illustrators like Willy Pogány and Edmund Dulac pandered to the middle- and working-class preference for fantasy and the exotic East. Between these two poles—illustrations guided by a reverence of the text on one hand, and the use of the text as nothing but a convenient springboard for exoticism—lies a range of works that blur the boundaries between high and low art. This paper will discuss a selection of illustrations in terms of artist interpretation and perceived audience to explore the impact of the Rubáiyát on various strata of society.
Michelle Kaiserlian
Flexible Design: The Multiple Target Audiences for
Edward Gorey’s Picture Books
Edward Gorey, author and illustrator of picture books, had practical experience with nearly every facet of book production. He worked in the art departments at Doubleday Anchor and Random House, and taught children’s literature to students of visual arts. In addition to writing and illustrating books, he frequently hand-lettered the text, and sometimes published under his own imprint, the Fantod Press. Gorey harnessed this varied professional experience to carve out a unique niche in both popular and collector markets.
His success prompted comics advocate Scott McCloud to include Gorey among the “promising artists” that the comics genre has lost to the realm of high culture. Originally released in small-format limited editions, Gorey’s texts were republished in a more accessible form in the three Amphigorey collections. These share a number of properties with traditional comics compilations, including a mass market audience and a frame-based page layout. The collections significantly complicated Gorey’s highbrow cult status, and fueled controversy over his appeal to juvenile readers. Looking at both the collectibles and the compilations, this paper attributes Gorey’s success in bridging the high-low culture divide to his manipulation of text, images, and book design to challenge the age-based partition of the reading market
Rohanna Green
Text, Illustration,
Class and Culture in the ‘New Yorker’
One of the most common jibes at the New Yorker is that no one reads it; they only look at the cartoons and advertisements, and leave it on the coffee table as signifier of class, education, and taste. The illustrations in the New Yorker were markedly different to its competition, as it carried no photographs until the late 1980s, the type of editorial finickiness that some critics find pretentious. This criticism highlights the magazine’s ambiguous cultural status; derided alternately as elitist and highbrow and as conservative and middlebrow. Central to these determinations are advertisements for luxury products, which are as recognizable an aspect of the New Yorker’s layout as the typeface and ‘departments,’ which work together to pin the magazine’s desired and presumed class readership. However, the relationship between text and image is ambiguous. The text often undermines the cultural and ideological messages coded in the advertisements, creating tension between illustration and text, mass consumption and cultural criticism, and popular and elite culture. This paper will explore the productive nature of these tensions in producing a new form of mass-circulation illustrated text, as the New Yorker’s ‘civil wars’ resulted in reformed genres of text and illustration.
Richard Corey
Richard.Corey@arts.usyd.edu.au
Illustrated Texts II:
The Illustrated Text and the Highs and
Lows of History
Session Coordinator:
Keri A. Berg
Ideological
Illustrations: The Case of Description de L’
Egypte
This paper explores the ideologies
at work in the illustrated, multi-volume work, Description de L’Egypte,
produced by the French during their occupation of
This paper seeks to cover another
aspect of the ideological framework of 19th century
On a more subconscious level, a
host of the illustrations reflect a fascination (that accompanies the conscious
disdain) with the royal, expressing an ambivalent force at work that is
competing with
Maha Baddar
Ambivalent Visibility and the Politics of
Internment in Citizen 13660
Originally published by Columbia University Press in 1946, Miné Okubo’s stunning graphic memoir, Citizen 13660, was the first personal account of the Japanese American experience of internment during World War II. While a handful of drawings from Okubo’s book had been published in a 1944 issue of Fortune magazine that focused on Japan (where her work and that of other Japanese American artists was made strange bedfellows with scathing anti-Japanese propaganda), the postwar political climate meant that Okubo had great difficulty finding a publisher for the book after the war, and not surprisingly it quickly went out of print. Interest in the work was revived after it was submitted to a congressional committee that examined the possibility of reparations for former internees, and it has been in publication since 1983. I argue that this particular publication history reflects various ways that the internment has historically been situated within the popular imagination. Furthermore, I argue that the lack of scholarly attention that Citizen 13660 has received is due to both its generic ambiguity and political ambivalence. But it is precisely this slipperiness that makes it such a rich site for analysis, and an important intervention into literary, American, and Asian American studies.
Jessica Knight
Visualizing an Iranian Girlhood in Auto/graphics: Marjane
Satrapi’s
This
essay examines how interaction between text narration and images functions in
constructing an Iranian girlhood in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003). In this work, Satrapi
uses the particular form of graphic novel to document her experiences as a
young girl around the time of the Islamic Revolution in
Lan Dong
In this
paper, I assert that the aesthetic aims of the graphic novel, as a genre, are
defined by a parodic imperative that interrogates the latent promise of
salvation in the faded pages of famous superheroes. Working loosely within
Linda Hutcheon’s fundamental understanding of postmodern parody as “the ironic
signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity,” I argue that by
adopting the icons and accoutrements of superhero comics, the graphic novel
exploits the visual signs and rhetorical commonplaces of this established – and
putatively “low” – medium in order to unmask the ephemerality of escape.
In other
words, the stock characters of comics have become, in the graphic novel, merely
stocky. Like the Superman of his too-tight t-shirt, Ware’s timorous Jimmy
Corrigan is isolated and essentially unknowable, albeit without the heroic
utility; he shudders from the world as though waiting to be scooped up and
saved. So, too, have the images of the mask and cape – like those of
Hornschemeier’s twice-orphaned Thomas in Mother,
Come Home – become symbols of futility. Cloaked in the traditional
superheroic guise, Thomas embarks on a mission to rescue his father – wistfully
aware that it is no longer possible “to save anyone anymore.”
David Olsen