Wood Engravings Research Articles

Nineteenth-Century Intersex Bodies and the ‘Appearance of a Double Sex’: Nadar’s Medical Anti-Illustration

Abstract This essay demonstrates that Nadar’s 1860 ‘Hermaphrodite’ series disappeared from the famed French photographer’s oeuvre because it does not function as a medical illustration. It explains the relative obscurity of the series and reveals often-overlooked biases and distortions in medical illustrations. By placing the photographs in the context of nineteenth-century European medical theories about the intersex body, and the successful illustrations, often wood engravings, that accompanied those theories in texts, it reveals that Nadar’s series contradicted rather than supported existing anatomical teachings in an artistic medium renowned for its fidelity to nature, thus posing a threat to medical authority. Whereas doctors asserted that the hermaphrodite was a biological myth, an aberration obscuring natural male or female bodies that could be easily identified by experts, Nadar’s photographs, backed by the medium’s inherent claim to indexical truth, showed the intersex body as naturally integrated and complete and thus doomed themselves to obscurity.

To Reenact the Invisible Monster: Demon House and Fury of the Demon

Abstract: This article brings together the television documentary Demon House (dir. Zak Bagans, 2018) and mockumentary Fury of the Demon (dir. Fabien Delage, 2016). In media, demons are invisible monsters, shown primarily by the aftereffects of possession (such as a change in voice or in an abject way like vomiting). They can also be depicted via artistic interpretation. In both films, the filmmakers claim to be providing "evidence" of the titular demons, yet the bases of evidence comprise artworks (paintings, sculptures, wood engravings and wax models), rather than the photographic archive that audiences would expect in "traditional documentaries." Images that do not evince any sort of photographic realism are used as placeholders to retell a completely different event—that may or may not have taken place—to uphold the notion of an invisible monster. The representations are mere copies, a reenactment of a reenactment . These layers of intangibility exemplify both the lack of evidence and the invisibility of the monster.

The common black-eared opossum in the symbolic and iconographic universe. From the effigy ornaments in the lesser Antilles to the European graphics of Simivulpa and its variants in the 16th – 17th centuries

This study focuses on the aesthetic analysis, iconographic variants, and symbolism of the common black-eared opossum (Didelphis marsupialis Linnaeus 1758) in ceramic ornaments of agro-ceramic origin of the Saladoid tradition with Barrancoid influence, located in the south of the Lesser Antilles arc and Venezuela, currently held in different collections, scientific academies, and museums around the world, particularly in the Caribbean and United States. Likewise, it will study an entire corpus of prints with descriptions and illustrations of the marsupial, the latter being elaborated by European artists through wood engravings or etchings. For this purpose, chroniclers and artists often relied on the analogical outline of Aristotle, disarticulating the didelphidae into anatomic parts to later compare them with those of other animals according to their degree of similarity, usually being with species of the so-called Old World, in order to create a ‘new’ concept, in reality, an anomalous creature, resulting from the juxtaposition of images of the ‘old’ over the ‘new’, in order to show the intelligible and unknown of the Caribbean world in a way that is comprehensible and accessible to the human mind, with the objective of providing zoological continuity and closing the gaps that once separated both ‘worlds’, in other words, the semiosis of Charles Sanders Peirce.

The common black-eared opossum in the symbolic and iconographic universe. From the effigy ornaments in the lesser Antilles to the European graphics of Simivulpa and its variants in the 16th – 17th centuries

This study focuses on the aesthetic analysis, iconographic variants, and symbolism of the common black-eared opossum (Didelphis marsupialis Linnaeus 1758) in ceramic ornaments of agro-ceramic origin of the Saladoid tradition with Barrancoid influence, located in the south of the Lesser Antilles arc and Venezuela, currently held in different collections, scientific academies, and museums around the world, particularly in the Caribbean and United States. Likewise, it will study an entire corpus of prints with descriptions and illustrations of the marsupial, the latter being elaborated by European artists through wood engravings or etchings. For this purpose, chroniclers and artists often relied on the analogical outline of Aristotle, disarticulating the didelphidae into anatomic parts to later compare them with those of other animals according to their degree of similarity, usually being with species of the so-called Old World, in order to create a ‘new’ concept, in reality, an anomalous creature, resulting from the juxtaposition of images of the ‘old’ over the ‘new’, in order to show the intelligible and unknown of the Caribbean world in a way that is comprehensible and accessible to the human mind, with the objective of providing zoological continuity and closing the gaps that once separated both ‘worlds’, in other words, the semiosis of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Nordic Travels

Nordic Travels

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song: Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song:Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text Isobel Armstrong (bio) How does one think about an illustrated poem? Does the illustration belong to the poem or the poem to the illustration? The etymological derivation of "illustration" is from Latin illustrare—il + lustrare—to shed light, to illuminate, to light up. The sense of illustration as a text plus drawing did not emerge until the mid-seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The meaning of illustration is strangely equivocal: logically the text is prior to its illustration—it gives instructions to the artist—but secondary in the illustration's capacity to light up the prior text. The image is the thing we see first, the primary exponent of meaning. It makes immediate visual claims on the reader—certainly in the case of Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song—almost before the text is absorbed. The illustration appears to throw light on the poem, but the poem also "explains" the illustration; and yet it may well be an explanation that is limited, posthumously as it were, by the illustration itself. Each exercises a limit on the other. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, the pioneering scholar of Rossetti illustration, has found a fertile language for this relation: she writes of Sing-Song's illustrations as "composites," texts with a "reciprocal" relation to each other, in dialogue, dialogical.1 I want to pursue this reciprocity by asking a further question: What does an illustration illustrate? There is no simple deictic relation between image and text. The animate world of the nursery rhyme, where animals and plants abut on the human world and where language plays with the acoustics of pun, riddle, nonsense, and the rhythms of the body, making use of nonsemantic sound and prosodic patterns of rhyme and assonance outside representation, can hardly be "translated" into the visual. Constance Hassett writes eloquently of the phonemic "delirium," for instance, of the fifth poem in Sing-Song, its "Kookoorookoo!" and "Kikirikee! kikirikee!"2 It is a world where the sensory and somatic qualities of words are ends in themselves. What sort of interrelation can there be between sheer sound and image? That is the problem for all [End Page 547] images claiming to represent language. For Jacques Rancière the image, is always problematical because the image is intrinsically cleft into two elements when it claims mimetic correspondence. While it can stand in for likeness to an original by lines and brush strokes, it is not what it images. Thus its double nature as resemblance and dissemblance means an oscillation between likeness and alterity. But language, too, is subject to this same coupling and uncoupling oscillation: signifiers are arbitrarily linked to the sound-signified, and yet they possess a "blinding" visibility for us, fused with what we think they represent, the sayable and the visible under the same rubric.3 So if language and images come together, if images claim to represent writing, a text, rather than objects in the world, that relation is bound to be complex. Some of these questions can be addressed because Sing-Song acquired not one but three illustrators—Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and Alice Boyd—and the play between them helps to show what an illustration can be. Or rather, it discloses three quite different forms of illustration, three Victorian modes of approaching image and text. Each one changes the poem in subtle ways. I call these emblematic, narratorial, and performative modes of illustration. Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song was published in 1872, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes brought into being by the facsimile wood engravings of the Dalziel Brothers.4 Rossetti herself illustrated her fair copy manuscript of Sing-Song with small figures placed above the text—she called these her "scratches."5 This makes the "meaning" of the book's illustrations complex enough, particularly as we might properly think of the Dalziel firm's unknown wood engravers, who turned a drawing into a print and were wholly responsible for mediating its end product, as more than proxy illustrators. These have recently been characterized, indeed, as "ghost writers," their critical functions recognized as an essential element of print illustration.6 I bracket the...

Printing Imperfections in William Blake’s Virgil Wood Engravings and What They Reveal

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, is perhaps best known to Blake scholars for its magnificent suite of watercolors illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was purchased from the John Linnell sale at Christie’s in London in 1918. The NGV also holds a composite group of fourteen wood engravings that Blake designed and engraved for Dr. Robert Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil, which were purchased in London in 1959 and are believed to have formed part of Linnell’s collection as well. At first glance, these wood engravings are underwhelming; four are quite poor impressions, and one is a unique hybrid between a print and an ink wash drawing. Nevertheless, extensive technical examination undertaken by the NGV’s paper conservation studio has revealed a range of printing imperfections, attributable to material choice and studio practices, which provide a tangible commentary on the complex history of Blake’s Virgil woodblocks and the various artists who printed from them.

Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley

Reviewed by: Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley Emma Liggins (bio) Alison Hedley, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), pp. 187, $85/ £70.99 hardcover. Drawing on media studies approaches and new understandings of technology, Making Pictorial Print gives a lively, broad-ranging account of the significance of images in the periodical at the fin de siècle. Whilst recent studies have paid welcome attention to illustration and image reproduction in nineteenth-century journalism, Alison Hedley's timely intervention broadens conceptualisations of text-image relations across a number of representative magazines and encourages us to rethink their complex visuality and rapidly increasing audiences. She demonstrates that what she terms "the technological imagination," encompassing the modernity of new communication technologies from the gramophone to the camera, is hugely significant for appreciating "readers' enhanced awareness of media materiality" (16). As she argues, "Popular illustrated magazines prepared mass readerships for modern media systems," helping to usher in a new media age (17). Analysing advertisements, photographs, magazine headers, wood engravings, and scrapbooks, Hedley shows how pictorial magazines, and indeed popular culture in general, became increasingly visual and multimodal as the twentieth century approached. This new media landscape "created new possibilities for readers to exert agency" and make meaning at a time of periodical diversification (62). She takes as her case studies the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson's Magazine, and the Strand Magazine, all popular Victorian publications with long print runs surviving into the 1930s and beyond. Although oriented around general [End Page 459] interest periodicals and omitting the widely read women's magazines of this era, this selection allows Hedley to examine reader engagement and different aesthetic representations in detail. A good range of periodical pages are included to demonstrate the variety and variability of images in circulation. Beginning with the new visuality of the Illustrated London News (ILN) at the turn of the century, Hedley argues that print's "established text-image hierarchy" was subverted at the fin de siècle (29). She draws on André Gaudreault and Phillipe Marion's three-phase model for constituting media—appearance, emergence, and advent—to demonstrate that advances in print technology and changing attitudes to visual communication transformed the balance between letterpress and pictures in the ILN. Her quantitative analysis of random sample numbers shows that image-dominated pages increased from 42 percent of the issue in 1880 to 85 percent by 1907, correlating with the rise in halftones from photographs. Hedley reads a representative item from 1907, "Fairy Stories by Photography: Grimm Illustrated," in terms of a hybrid intermediality that "[juxtaposes] old and new aesthetic techniques" through a combination of photography and hand-drawn or painted images (55). The second chapter focuses on advertisements and consumer culture in a comparison between the ILN and the Graphic, examining the metamorphosis of the advertising pages into a "visual bazaar of images of slogans" built on greater "extravagant aesthetics" (63). This adds to critical discussions of advertising though a greater emphasis on readers' engagement with mass culture and "counter-interpretative hyper-reading" (87). Hedley's new readings of advertisements for cocoa and Pears soap emphasise the techniques of mélange and hybridity while also thinking about ways in which readers could resist advertisers' strategies. This resistance could take the form of curatorial remediations, as shown in her analysis of a scrapbook from the Harry Page collection of ephemera at Manchester Metropolitan University, which contains elaborate pictorial scenes accompanied by handwritten comments. I was fascinated to read about this subversive commentary on consumerism evident in the fetishized displays of commercial brands on scraps cut from periodical advertisements, a lesser-known tactic of alternative interpretation. Possibilities for subversive engagement are also highlighted in the third chapter, which explores data visualizations in Pearson's Magazine (1896–1902) in relation to reader engagement with population journalism. Photorealistic representations of statistical data on such subjects as marriage or suicide rates function as further examples of the aesthetic evolution through which illustrated periodicals of this time "responded to innovations in mass image reproduction" (112). Readers have the chance to...

A Socio-Cultural Look at Eighteenth-Nineteenth-Century Samogitian Wood Carvings

In 2020, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art hosted the exhibition ‘And the Word Became a Sight: Visual Narratives in Lithuanian Wood Carvings and Linocuts of the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’. The purpose of the exhibition was to showcase scenes from the Bible, stories of the lives of the saints (the old eighteenth-nineteenth-century wood carvings), and illustrations of literary works (twentieth-century wood engravings and linocuts). Although the purpose was achieved, quite a few interesting aspects revealed during the preparation for the exhibition were left behind and overlooked during it, since the visual narratives were defined as direct biblical or literary stories brought to the audience by the carver. Therefore, this text will merely supplement these narratives with additional references that provide more context to the narratives of the engravings. The article dwells on the circumstances and authors of the works; among other authors, the focus is slightly stronger on Aleksandras Vinkus-Vitkauskas, whose 190th birth anniversary and 110th death anniversary will be commemorated in 2022. The narratives will gain broader historical and socio-cultural contexts that were discerned while exploring individual carving details or carved texts. Research was focused on eighteenth-nineteenth-century Samogitian wood carvings, as it was this particular group of exhibits that transcended the purpose of the exhibition in its eloquence. The article offers a short description of a number of interesting authors and pieces and explains specific qualities of certain types of iconography.

Queen Victoria’s <i>Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands</i>: Illustrated Print Culture and the Politics of Representation

Queen Victoria published her first Highland memoir in 1867, a sentimental narrative of royal life dedicated to Prince Albert entitled Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. In response to the popularity of this edition, the publisher Smith, Elder and Co. released a lavishly illustrated edition in late 1868 to capitalize on the Christmas gift book market. It featured seventy-nine illustrations after works by various artists and photographers. When scholars have turned their attention to the Queen’s journal, they have produced rich and sophisticated discussions of gender, monarchy, and celebrity, especially as they relate to royal domesticity in the Scottish Highlands. Yet these readings have rarely extended to the illustrated version of the text. This article will consider the conjunction of monarchy, the Scottish Highlands, and illustrated print culture in the illustrated Leaves through two different types of images: steel-plate engravings after watercolours by the artist Carl Haag and wood engravings after watercolour sketches of Highland games by the Swedish artist Egron Lundgren. Each positions the male Highlander as a central figure in constructing the dynamic of royal family life, sovereignty, and empire. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have recently explored what it meant for the British to be ‘at home with the Empire’, asking ‘was it possible to be “at home” with an empire and with the effects of imperial power or was there something dangerous and damaging about such an entanglement?’. In the course of this article, I argue that these illustrations constructed the male Highlander as a site of familiarity within the bounds of the nation, while simultaneously signalling his otherness and proximity to the more far-flung reaches of empire. As a result, Leaves is as much about empire as it is about domesticity, even as it eschews direct references to current events of the period that directly threatened both. 

Driving Wild Cattle in Illustrated Magazines from Britain to France, and from France to Germany

This case study on English, French, and German penny magazines from the 1830s aims to make visible a mostly overlooked way of producing and diffusing knowledge—not least ethnographic knowledge—in early illustrated magazines. By investigating an example of trading stereotyped wood engravings between England, France, and Germany, the present paper retraces the development of a periodical-specific international verbal-visual syntax which was triggered by the emergence of illustration. It retraces how magazine makers learned within a few months to give meaning to illustrated periodicals’ layout, to the arrangement of thematically heterogeneous articles’ letterpress and images on a double-page spread—and how they used the semanticized mise-en-page of their magazines’ openings to express international connections and tensions. Thus, the page design of illustrated periodicals turns out to be a means of an implicit ethnography, an instrument to render the profile of the own nation, ἔθνος, readable and visible by γραφή, by printed writing and wood-engraved drawings.

‘The Pictures Which We Publish To-Day Are Fearful to Look Upon’: The Circulation of Images of Atrocity During the American Civil War

This article explores the circulation of photographs of prisoners of war that were taken at the US General Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland in 1864. More specifically, it considers the publication of these images as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly’s illustrated newspaper as part of a broader network of photographic circulation, and the circulation of images of atrocity during the American Civil War. This project follows recent interventions in photographic history that have emphasised reproduction and circulation, and that have decentred the photographic print as the primary site for the production of meaning. By examining the multiple visual and narrative contexts in which photographs of the Annapolis prisoners appeared, including as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly, this article reveals how divergent meanings were ascribed to the images, as both the press and the public sought to make sense of the prisoners’ deterioration and to use their images for political purposes. Ultimately, the article employs circulation as a methodology to understand how audiences used photographs to make sense of the seemingly ineffable trauma and devastation of the American Civil War. This project also demonstrates how Harper’s Weekly relied upon an existing public archive – of text and images, particularly cartes de visite – to report the news and to further its rhetorical position. It is important to highlight that the images in this article are disturbing. They show men in states of significant emaciation and were presumably taken without full consent. These pictures are shown as part of an effort to understand the ways in which images of atrocity were circulated in the nineteenth century, and, as such, requires that we consider the appropriateness of publishing and exhibiting such images both then and now. A question of care and of an ethics of looking must be at the forefront of this critical engagement.

Mapping Radical Poetic Geographies: The Sonnets of Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson

Mapping Radical Poetic Geographies: The Sonnets of Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson Jodie Childers (bio) Countering stereotypical and superficial depictions of contemporary Appalachia, the poets Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson construct innovative sonnets that resist reductive, monolithic notions of place and identity and illuminate a multivalent Appalachian culture informed by the diverse individual family stories and collective traditions that shape the region. In the American imagination, the poetic voices that highlight the complexities of Appalachia (a geographical distinction that covers 13 states) are too often overshadowed by derogatory stereotypes of the region disseminated through television and film. According to sociologist Rebecca Scott, “Appalachian stereotypes conflate the land and people with dark, trash-filled hollows sheltering isolated incestuous communities.” These images have material consequences to a region that suffers under a legacy of extractivism, environmental degradation, and systemic poverty. The historian Ronald Eller argues that these stereotypes “blame the victim for Appalachia’s problems,” which enables “the rest of America to keep the region at arm’s length, rather than to confront the systemic problems of a dependent economy, environmental decay, and institutional weakness that challenge mountain communities today.” For poets on the margins of American society, the sonnet can serve as a space to express and enact resistance to dominant discourse, a site to exploit the tension between adhering to literary traditions [End Page 185] and rebelling against them. Founder of the Affrilachian Poets collective, Frank X Walker experiments with the sonnet to create what he terms the “Affrilachian sonnet,” a novel poetic form rooted in Black Appalachian history and creative fortitude. Challenging patriarchal conceptualizations of work, Maggie Anderson employs the sonnet to preserve a feminist family lineage of labor in West Virginia. Harkening to literary conventions while also defying them, Walker and Anderson both reinvent the sonnet on their own terms, mapping radical poetic geographies rooted in Appalachian history and culture. Born in Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is a prolific poet and interdisciplinary artist with an expansive oeuvre of work, tackling a range of themes from the autobiographical to the historical. In 1991, he coined the neologism “Affrilachia,” a portmanteau that gave voice to the intersecting experience of Black and Appalachian identities and laid the groundwork for a powerful movement in the arts that continues to grow and thrive. Building upon Walker’s vision, the collective of Affrilachian Poets “render the invisible visible” by celebrating “a multicultural influence, a spectrum of people who consider Appalachia home and/or identify strongly with the trials and triumphs of being of this region.” In 2000, Walker published the poetry collection Affrilachia, featuring candid lyrical reflections on race, place, and identity. Through subsequent volumes of historically informed poetry including Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), which was awarded the Lillian Smith Book Award, Walker has used the persona poem to foreground figures from African American history, “rescuing muted and silenced voices.” In 2007, Walker and the poet Nikky Finney launched the literary periodical Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, and in 2018, the University Press of Kentucky published the anthology Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets. The history of the Affrilachian Poets has also been documented in the film Coal Black Voices: The History of the Affrilachian Poets, which Walker co-produced. In 2016, Walker turned to the sonnet in his special edition book The Affrilachian Sonnets, published with Larkspur Press. A unique [End Page 186] experiment in style, form, and content, this book inaugurates a new and distinctive form of Walker’s own design in dialogue with wood engravings by the artist Joanne Price. While the sonnets in this collection follow the 14-line structure, they do not conform to conventional patterns of rhyme and meter. In an interview with Bruce Dick and Forrest Yerman, Walker explains how he conceived the structure for these poems: “I felt that I wanted to take something traditional and morph it back toward something useful to me. So to call it an Affrilachian sonnet means that I get to define it, and it doesn’t have to fit the traditional Italian or Shakespearean sonnet forms.” In one poem from this collection entitled “Gunning for Bear,” Walker delineates...

Revising the history of number: how Ethnomathematics transforms perspectives on indigenous cultures

Many accounts of the history of number rely on written evidence such as clay, stone, and wood engravings or paintings. However, some of the oldest cultural groups (between 5 000 and 30 000 years old) have had only recent contact with the rest of the world, namely between 80 and 140 years ago but these were oral cultures without written records. Finding out about their understanding of number has involved analysis of the types of counting but also how counting related to the rest of their cultural relationships. There is some surprising evidence of diversity of number systems, longevity of the systems, and the interplay with cultural practices that begs respect for Indigenous cultures. Brief summaries of this history of number in Papua New Guinea and Oceania and the diversity of systems is followed by how this new knowledge can inform school mathematics learning in any part of the world.

Soviet engravings and the Chinese writer Lu Xun

This article analyzes the relations between the Chinese writer Lu Xun and Soviet engravings. Lu Xun is attributed to one of the most prominent Chinese literary figures of the past century. His significant contribution to the development of culture also consists in the fact that in the 1930’s he collected, edited and published a substantial amount of Soviet engravings. This is why his is known in China as the “Founder of the collection of wood engravings”. The article represents an cross-disciplinary research in the field of art history, culturology and literature, particular in the area of history of Soviet art and Chinese literature. The research elucidates the key milestones of life path of Lu Xun, associated with the increase of cultural level of Chinese young students through familiarization of majority of the population with Soviet engraving. However, his relations with the Soviet art, and namely Soviet engraving, are insufficiently covered. The article talks about the forgotten achievements in the area of Soviet arts in China.

Gustave Doré’s Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854): The Invention of Graphic Rhetoric, or the Artist at War

ABSTRACTThe Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie (1854) by Gustave Doré (1832–83) is unique in the history of nineteenth-century European graphic art and an exceptional project within Doré's artistic career. Illustrated with 500 wood engravings, it narrates the history of Russia from its origins to the contemporary Crimean war. This article examines the volume as a tour de force of technological innovation and graphic rhetoric that confronts the challenge of how to represent war and its violence. To appeal to a broad audience, the artist pioneered a caricatural, graphic sequential history that anticipates modern bande dessinée tackling twentieth-century warfare.

On the Time and Place of the Printing of Francysk Skaryna’s Little Traveler’s Book

As we continue to solve the issues of book science of the 16th century, we have to be very guarded in questions of terminology. This is of particular importance when we talk about the Little Traveler’s Book, which begins the history of typography in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. There is a widespread belief that the abovementioned book was printed in Vilnius approximately in 1522. It would be more correct to say that the Little Traveler’s Book was completed in Vilnius. One of its parts – a set of eight Akathists and eight canons – could have been printed earlier in Prague.
 This hypothesis can be supported with several arguments. In contrast with the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles (the Apostle, 1525), the Little Traveler’s Book is not dated anywhere and in terms of content, it is a heterogeneous (composite) publication. Considering the content of the Little Traveler’s Book, the elements that particularly stand out are the Akathists and canons that contain unique wood engravings, endpieces, vignettes, borders, and initials. Two wood engravings were made by one “Master of the New Testament,” whose works were published in the Prague Book of Psalms (1517).
 The autonomy of an Akathist as a particular publication is accented by the publisher’s acrostic colophon, written in the last Akathist via initials. The Akathists housed in Wroclaw (Wroclaw University Library, No. 305071) can represent the Prague period of typography. E. Nemirovkij’s “evidence” regarding the Vilnius origin of the Akathist is incorrect.

The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge

Reviewed by: The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge Julia McCord Chavez (bio) Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), pp. v + 331, $85.00 hardcover. The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier, by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, provides illuminating new answers to a foundational question for Victorian periodical studies: “How does the form of the illustrated Victorian serial novel invite readers to read?” (2). Drawing upon an impressive range of archival research and invoking an eclectic set of case studies that range from canonical works such as David Copperfield (May 1849–November 1850) and The Small House at Allington (September 1862–April 1864) to lesser-examined works such as The Tower of London (January–December 1840), Griffith Gaunt (December 1865–November 1866), and Peter Ibbetson (June–December 1891), Leighton and Surridge convincingly argue that images and letterpress in Victorian serial fiction most often function as coequal modes of representation that “impel reflective and complex reading strategies” (50). Anchoring their analysis in narratology, the theory of how fiction is narrated, Leighton and Surridge demonstrate that illustration does more than simply picture a novel’s text; instead, images add complexity and “thicken” serial plots by infusing Victorian novels with a second source of narrative influence (19). Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of The Plot Thickens, and this is reflected in an astute methodology that embraces historical, materialist, and formalist approaches to the illustrated Victorian serial. The introductory chapter, “Material Matters,” provides a detailed history of the developing technologies of book illustration (from steel etchings and engravings [End Page 806] to wood engravings to photomechanical reproduction); an overview of the Victorian literary marketplace informed by the work of Robert L. Patten, Brian Maidment, Julia Thomas, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Catherine Golden, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, and others; and a new theoretical lens for reading serial illustration. The innovative application of narratology to images as well as letterpress is a significant contribution to the field of periodical studies because it provides a precise vocabulary for describing verbal-visual relationships. As Leighton and Surridge point out, “Narratological terms—such as prolepsis, analepsis, mimesis, diegesis, iteration, repetition, and extradiegesis—can help us to identify and understand these complex relationships between visual and verbal plots” (20). The remaining chapters of the book, grouped by genre, apply narratological analysis to representative texts from the birth of the format in the 1830s through the waning of the serial novel during the fin de siècle. The first chapter focuses on the genre of autobiography through two case studies: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, illustrated by Hablot K. Browne, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phyllis (November 1863–February 1864), illustrated by George Du Maurier. Analyzing the representation of reading and the presence of word pictures within these illustrated serials, Leighton and Surridge argue that “the technology of the illustrated book became a potent metaphor for inner life, memory, and self making” (53). Historical serial fiction is the focus of chapter two, which examines The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth with illustrations by George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray’s self-illustrated Vanity Fair (January 1847–July 1848), and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Looking specifically at the two dominant modes of visual historical representation—metaphorical and metonymic—the authors argue that the illustrations in each example interact with the letterpress to produce a distinctive theorization of historical change. The Tower of London uses metonymic wood engravings, for example, to inspire readers to preserve national monuments. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, “deploys verbal and visual sign systems to play ironically with both imagined scenes and metonymic representations of the past” (95). Even two different illustrated versions of the same novel, in the case of A Tale of Two Cities, provide contrasting visions of history. The American version in Harper’s Weekly (May 7–December 3, 1859), illustrated by John McLenan, uses “matching mimesis” to create for readers “an illusion of immediacy and immersion in history” (95). In contrast...

Eminent Victorian Cartoonists by Richard Scully

Reviewed by: Eminent Victorian Cartoonists by Richard Scully Brian Maidment (bio) Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists, 3 vols. (London: Political Cartoon Society, 2018), pp. 665 £36 hardcover. Both substantial and accessible, Richard Scully's study of eleven productive Victorian cartoonists will be of lasting value and considerable significance to periodicals research. The three volumes are organised around three loosely defined chronological phases in the publication of Victorian cartoons and their key artists: "The Founders" (John "HB" Doyle, John Leech, and Sir John Tenniel), "The Rivals of 'Mr Punch'" (Matthew Somerville Morgan, John Proctor, William Henry Boucher, Fred Barnard, and John Gordon Thomson), and "Heirs and Successors" (Linley Sambourne, Bernard Partridge, and Francis Curruthers Gould). Scully gives each cartoonist a spacious biography, frequently supported with new material from the primary sources that he has diligently assembled, and a careful account of the artist's graphic contributions to political debates. Each chapter focuses on an individual artist (Proctor and Boucher are taken together, however) with a thematic subtitle summary; Morgan at Fun and Tomahawk, for example, is designated as the "Bohemian Upstart" of the mid-Victorian cartoon in contrast to "The Tory Rivals of Tenniel" represented by Proctor and Boucher in Will O' The Wisp, Judy, and Moonshine. Scully's organisational structure—beginning with a broad overview of the field, moving on to individual artists positioned as representative, and finally presenting detailed accounts of the lives and work of each artist—offers a more substantial and better-informed generic map of the Victorian cartoon than anything previously available. His choice of subjects encompasses the central role undertaken by Punch in defining the graphic potential of the cartoon, but it brings the range of mid-Victorian graphic satire much more [End Page 636] clearly into focus and reminds us of the visual richness to be found in other major Victorian comic magazines. As the title suggests, Scully's project is underpinned by two complementary ideas. Through their lively and complex satirical attention to politics and manners, the "eminent Victorians" studied here serve as an antidote to the gloomy, repressed, and anxious subjects of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). Underlying the immediate reverberations of Strachey's title is a reminder of how central humour was to the Victorian frame of mind and how Victorian studies has rejected cliché notions of the Victorian over the last fifty years. But Scully also quite clearly asserts a high degree of eminence for these artists despite their relative obscurity and frequent subordination to the printed word within the academic study of Victorian periodicals. A second aspect of his project, then, is to give due credit to a number of undervalued artists whose eminence resides not just in the graphic work they produced but also in their creative contribution to the networks, circles, and cultural geography from which periodicals emerge. "Cartoonist," too, is a significant term. While some of the artists in this study produced many comic images for books, Scully defines the nineteenth-century cartoon as a form that was essentially associated with the magazine. Thus his starting place is 1843, the moment that Punch settled on "cartoon" as the term most applicable to its full-page satirical illustrations of topical socio-political events. "Caricature" was perhaps too closely linked to a single-plate commodity culture and its genteel audience, while "pencillings" (the first term used by Punch) seems inappropriately tenuous for the bold line and clearly stated political content of Punch's big satirical illustrations. The term "cuts" remained in use, alluding both to their wood-engraved mode of production and their ability to cut to the quick of an issue, but the massive two-coloured allusive wood engravings that Morgan produced for Tomahawk were a million miles away from the vernacular woodcut. The "cartoon" thus became a central defining characteristic of the humorous magazine until the end of the century when it migrated to the illustrated newspaper, which could better exploit its topicality. While Scully's volumes contain a great deal of new information gathered from an extensive study of available resources, they also offer an important guide to the methodological complexities of studying cartoons. Scully has already published significant work in this field, especially...

Albertine: From A to Z, the Journey of Combining Opposites

AlbertineFrom A to Z, the Journey of Combining Opposites Loreto Núñez (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Albertine Zullo combines in her name A and Z, a pair of opposite letters. This fusion of contrasts is programmatic for her life and work. Albertine is deeply rooted in Switzerland, more specifically in Geneva and its countryside, where she was born and still lives today with her partner in love and art, author Germano Zullo. After her studies at the École des arts décoratifs and the École supérieure d'art visuel of Geneva, she opened a screen-printing workshop and started to collaborate as an illustrator with various Swiss and French newspapers. From 1996 to 2014, she taught screen-printing and illustration at the Haute École d'art et de design of Geneva. In parallel, she pursued a very productive artistic career: drawings, screen prints, lithographic works, wood engravings, notebooks, and objects of different types (such as dresses). She has been exhibited in Switzerland and abroad: Paris, Bologna, Rome, Valencia, and Tokyo. Thus, staying in her native Swiss village, Albertine travels around the world, as her books do—produced in a countryside house, but travelling from one country to the other, accompanied by texts in different languages according to their various translations. The journey is a very present theme in her production, too, again in an opposite perspective. On the one hand, she invites us on trips going so far as to another planet; on the other, she can play with total absence of travel, with many variations in-between. In the comic book Vacances sur Vénus (Holiday on Venus), a young man wants to go on holiday but takes the wrong way and makes a stop at Venus, where he meets a strange extraterrestrial girl. The anecdote ends up in a sort of distant love story. Albertine puts forward the difficulty of communication between the protagonists at the level of the images by presenting the young alien's words as pictograms. Furthermore, whereas she chooses cold and pale colors for the Earth (blue, yellow, and turquoise), the predominant colors of Venus are red, orange, and green. Colors are completely absent in A l'étranger (Abroad): Albertine depicts only in black and white a man's vain search for the foreign country where everything should be better. His journey concludes with the discovery that the foreign place he has been searching for may actually be his home. The choice of sober black and white images accentuates the poetic strength of the [End Page 20] text. Furthermore, the predominance of white spaces gives the possibility of pauses in the textual and iconic rhythm, thus giving the opportunity to reflect on what one reads and sees. In Des mots pour la nuit (Words for the night), the journey takes place in the young protagonist's dream. Staying in his bed, he travels around the pages—starting in his room with his colorful toys, going through landscapes full of flowers and sheep, and meeting figures and characters which become more and more oneiric, with the colors getting darker, at the limit of the nightmare atmosphere which transforms itself in a sort of intergalactic journey. Yet the protagonist finds his way home to his bedroom. Whereas in this picturebook there is a certain tension between travelling and staying at the same place, in La Java Bleue (The Blue Java), we face a static, almost claustrophobic story; it is the portrayal of a family whose existence revolves around watching TV until the day the television implodes. Until then, the space represented by Albertine remains the same one: the living/dining room. Following the TV implosion, the family has to find new activities. Even if they do not go out, Albertine makes them move in space (to other rooms) and in time (with objects of their past: a dress, a radio set and many toys). While the father and the mother dance, the boy plays with his toys, spread all over the living room. Albertine transforms the closed space of the page in a typical scene of so-called "wimmelbook," a teeming picturebook showing in a panoramic view many small figures...