Reading Icontexts: from Swift to the French Revolution (PICTURING HISTORY) - Tapa dura

Traditionally, pictures and literary texts have been discussed as "sister arts". Dealing with the reading and interpretation of "iconotexts" - combinations of texts and images - this book attempts to break down the barriers between art and literature. Focusing mainly on graphic art, it analyzes 18th-century prints as a particular variety of palimpsests - that is, of constructs conflating texts and images. One of the points the author makes is that one cannot study engravings without the texts they integrate implicitly or explicitly, and that illustrated books contain two kinds of discourse (visual and verbal) which more often than not are at odds with each other. The various chapters deal with the illustrations and front matter in "Gulliver's Travels", with the discourse of the state apparatuses in Hogarth's graphic art, and with obscene prints published during the French Revolution as a kind of new radical discourse. Peter Wagner's other books include "Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America" and "Erotica and the Enlightenment".

Traditionally, texts and images have been discussed together on the assumption that they are 'sister arts', but in Reading Iconotexts Peter Wagner pushes beyond the word-image opposition in a radical attempt to break down the barriers between literature and art. He sets out here the new approach he has identified for dealing with the 'iconotext' - a genre in which neither image nor text is free from the other. Examples include Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a number of William Hogarth's best-known engravings, and a sample of the so-called 'obscene' propaganda prints that were published during the French Revolution. Throughout, the author argues for the importance of seeing text and image as mutually interdependent in the ways they establish meaning. It becomes clear in the course of Wagner's exposition that one cannot study prints without taking into account their accompanying inscriptions; whilst illustrated books contain two kinds of 'text' - one verbal, one visual - that are invariably at odds with one another. Drawing on theories of intertextuality and semiotics as developed by Barthes and Kristeva, as well as post-structuralist studies by Derrida, Foucault and others, Reading Iconotexts treats pictures as encoded visual discourse and illustrations in books as counter-discourse. The author's persuasively argued polemic in favour of recognising the 'iconotext' as a viable advance in methodology is an important contribution to current debates on word and image.