Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text ed. by Christina Ionesc

Abstract

Reviewed by: Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text ed. by Christina Ionesc W. B. Gerard Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Pp. xviii + 609. £64.99; $109.99. Pictorial rendering of texts has blossomed in Catherine Gordon’s British Paintings of Subjects from the English Novel 1740–1870 (1988), Philip Stewart’s Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century (1992), and David Blewett’s The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–1820 (1996). This volume continues that growth. Ms. Ionescu’s Introduction might have been extended into a monograph. Its heavily [End Page 128] footnoted pages are comprehensive, though the references defy easy comprehension. The book lacks a catalogue of illustrations; like a critical edition of a text, a competent catalogue is often a necessary starting point. Ileana Baird perceptively analyzes the visual “paratexts” of illustrations and decorative imagery in early editions of The Dunciad; in addition to elucidating the cultural significance and historical and critical backgrounds, she provides careful readings of the images themselves. The 1728 and 1729 editions with Dullness’s owl and the burdened ass carrying specific books in the pannier illustrate the popular appetite for personal satire. Headpieces from the 1735 edition, where the emphasis changes “from illustrating the laughable foolishness of the dunces, to highlighting the serious consequences of their public performance,” reveal a cultural shift toward “religious and moral concerns.” Illustrations in mid-century editions, Ms. Baird suggests, picture “less political content and more everyday life information and social detail.” Much less useful is Yolanda Caballero Aceituno’s examination of the paratextual (black, marbled, and white pages and inserted graphics) in Tristram Shandy as a collective rebellion against an “orthodox Augustan humanism,” which she narrowly defines, primarily by misreading Paul Fussell’s 1965 monograph, as the control of “any possibility of self-assertion, especially through literary creativity.” Alas poor Swift and Pope! Building on this problematic position, Ms. Aceituno ignores previous discussions (save a nod to William V. Holtz). Commonplace statements are offered as “discoveries” (“incorporation of images and other typographical devices . . . was not merely experimental technique”; “it is clear these images [the lines of narrative progression at the end of volume six] are not mere adornments”). This has been obvious for over 250 years. The “activist” Sterne used his paratextuality to fight “against dogmatic rationalism . . . [and] the restrictive pessimism of Augustan humanism,” embodied by “hypercritics,” mentioned humorously three times in Tristram Shandy and elevated here to imperial censors. Sterne’s imagery may indeed occupy cultural space on the enticingly named “semiospheric frontier” (after theoretician Iuri Lotman’s semiosphere, “describing the whole semiotic space of a given culture”), but rather than illuminate, this obfuscates. Essays stretch boundaries, though not always usefully. Asserting a well-known need to “recognize a broader spectrum of visual response” beyond “the physical boundaries of the book,” Leigh G. Dillard invokes specific instances of “parallel illustration”: literary galleries (such as Boydell’s on Shakespeare), Hogarth’s 1725–1726 print series of Butler’s Hudibras and his spurious frontispiece to Gulliver’s Travels, and, most intriguingly, Francis Hayman’s designs for Richardson’s Pamela, which appeared in enlarged form on the supper-boxes of Vauxhall Gardens. Ms. Dillard’s categories for investigation—basically, paintings, prints, and collections of reproductions—are not new (despite the fanfare) though she addresses images created independently of the text and the “greater creative interpretation” available to painters and engravers. Elizabeth Kubek examines mimeticism and signification, rallying Lacan, Derrida, Saussure, and Sarah Hrdy toward a thesis on the “compensation and control . . . at work in eighteenth-century book illustration”; cited among title pages are Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy (1668), Hogarth’s [End Page 129] Analysis of Beauty (1753), and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and its sequel (1744). This eclectic grouping offers insights, but it challenges coherence and nothing is concluded. Darren Wagner explores how visualizations of the womb paralleled developments from early folkloric beliefs to the “unembellished, technical, and objective” scientific perspective. He notes that medical illustrations, though at times still subjected to the allegories of medieval...