Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text

Book Illustration in the LongEighteenth Century: Reconfiguring theVisual Periphery of the Text

Weinvite proposals for a collection of essays on the subject of book illustrationto be published in 2010. We areinterested in essays that reexamine the traditional role ascribed toillustrative images of eighteenth-century European texts. In the light ofrecent scholarship on eighteenth-century visual culture and on word and imageinteraction in illustrated books, should we consider the illustrative image tobe a mere ornament given itssupposedly decorative function, an element more or less important of theparatext due to its placement (peritextualor perigraphic in nature), an unwelcome supplement when visual contentdiverges from verbal text, an intermedial entity such as an iconotext becauseit fuses text and image, or an intertext where the past and the presentconverge or conflict?

Wewelcome case studies of illustrated books, cross-disciplinary investigations oftext-image interaction and theoretical analyses of the role of illustrationsthat use as examples eighteenth-century European texts.

Possibletopics include:

-reader response to eighteenth-century illustrated texts

-considerations of authorial intention and artistic agency

-publishing practices of eighteenth-century booksellers and printers

-reconfigurations of the distinction between text and paratext

-illustrative images as frames or meditative devices

-discrepancies or tensions between text and image

-interpretations of the graphic design of a particular edition

-illustration as a marketing device

-illustrative texts in the context of eighteenth-century visual culture

Pleasesubmit a 300-word abstract and a curriculum vitae as Microsoft Word attachmentsto Christina Ionescu (cionescu@mta.ca) by the deadline of March 15, 2009. Inquiriesare welcome.