The Art of the Text

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

"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