The Art of the Text: Visuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literary and Other Media(Studies in Visual Culture)

The Art of the Text contributes to the dialogue of textual studies with visual culture studies by focusing on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually. This volume’s contributors apply their backgrounds in literature, screen, and visual studies, to explore the visuality of the literary and nonliterary text with a sustained focus on French works of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here, not as a state, but as a means of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. In the process of reading visually, the contributors offer new insights on visual-textual relations in canonical texts drawn from romanticism, naturalism, surrealism, and high modernism, and across a range of media, from film, textiles, and television, to fan literature and picture language.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface 1. Introduction Susan Harrow Thinking the Visual Image 2. Jules Verne: The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing Timothy Unwin 3. Affinities of Photography and Syntax in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu Aine Larkin 4. Portraits and Neologisms: Understanding the Visual in Henri Michaux's 'Voyage en Grande Garabagne' Nina Parish 5. Into the 'trou noir': Visualizations of Nihilism in Nietzsche and Modiano Jenny Devine Intermedial Migrations in the 1920s 6. Painting and Cinema in Aragon's Anicet Katherine Shingler 7. Isotypes and Elephants: Picture Language as Visual Writing in Otto Neurath Michelle Henning 8. Colette : An Eye for Textiles Anne Freadman 9. Stars as Sculpture in the 1920s Fan-Magazine Interview Michael Williams Visual Negotiations and Adaptations 10. Victor Hugo and Painting: The Exceptional Case of the Orientales Karen Quandt 11. Visions and Re-visions: Zola, Cardinal and L'Aiuvre Kate Griffiths 12. Donner a voir: Poetic Language and Visual Representation according to Paul Eluard Peter Hawkins 13. A Heteromedial Analysis of Chantal Akerman's Proust Adaptation Jorgen Bruhn

About the Author :
Susan Harrow is Ashley Watkins Professor of French at the University of Bristol. Her research interests lie in modern poetry and narrative, and in the interrelation of literary modernism and visual culture. She is the author of books on modern French poetry and narrative.

Review :
"The Art of the Text is a rich and well-conceived collection of essays that, by virtue of the coherence of the vision underpinning the volume and the range of topics, genre, and media that it addresses, makes a distinctive and valuable contribution to word and image studies."--Jean J. Duffy, University of Edinburgh "How do writers think visually? How do readers respond visually to the written word? This exciting volume offers fresh insights within the rapidly evolving field of visual culture studies by pinpointing an important but as of yet underdeveloped area: the visuality of text. Drawing on a wide spectrum of practices, each affording a compelling instance of cross-fertilization between the written and the visual, the volume assembles wonderful close readings of important experimental works. Twelve international experts show how canonical creators have been inspired by thinking between the written word and a range of visual phenomena related to photography, textile, cinema, television, sculpture, painting, portraits, Isotype symbols, colors, lights, and black holes. The Art of the Text deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in intermedial adventure."--Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary, University of London