Reading Iconotexts

Reading Iconotexts Synopsis

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.