Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Images in Prose Fiction

Abstract

Photography, illustration and diagrams are staple devices in works of non-fiction, children’s literature and academic text books, yet they only rarely appear in works of adult twentieth and twenty-first century prose fiction. When visual devices such as photographs and diagrams do occur in a novel, they utilise the space of the page in a markedly different way to text. Most importantly to this study, these visual devices are a part of the graphic surface of the page and the reader sees them before they engage with the textual content. Pictures on the pages of contemporary prose fiction comment on the ever-present distinction between words and images when dealing with mimesis in literature. When images appear on the page, the distinction between the two different types of representation (visual and textual) is both simultaneously highlighted and blurred. Images alter or support textual interpretation in a way that requires different strategies of reading and subsequently, a different way of critically analysing them, ‘The imagetext reinscribes, within the worlds of visual and verbal representation, the shifting relation of names and things, the sayable and seeable, discourse about and experience of’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 241).