I really enjoyed our final class today and seeing the culmination of my classmate's hard work and their evolving ideas for the final Capstone Project. I found it very interesting to hear how each individual put their own unique spin on their chosen text. In particular, I really enjoyed the presentations on Goblin Market and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In both groups, there was a diverse array of synchronic and diachronic analysis' of their chosen work. I really enjoyed hearing the juxtaposition of ideas of 19 C Goblin Market to Zeinab's ideas on the 1970's rendition of Goblin Market that focused on themes such as the femme fatale and the male gaze, with extremely homoerotic illustrations. I also found it super interesting to see the different approaches my own group took when analyzing The Were-Wolf. Whereas Nicole and I focused on the design of Laurence Housman's illustrations and the meaning that can be extrapolated, I found it interesting to hear how Emma focused on the physical reproduction of the images in The Were-Wolf and how this image production was meaningful to the time period. All in all, I really enjoyed this class and the wide range of texts we studied (my favourite definitely being the understudied The Were-Wolf). I learned so much about the relationship between image and text and how an image and text can stand alone and respectively produce their own meaning. When examining picture books in the past I always assumed illustrations just accompanied and reflected the text, but this class has taught me that there is so much more to illustrations and left me with an arsenal of tools to analyze and read images. Illustrations are their own art form in its own right and collaborate critique, or even outshine the text itself. I am excited to see what my peers will create for the Cove Digital Exhibit and I look forward to adding to Ryerson's scholarly conversation on Victorian picture books. Thanks for a great class Dr. Kooistra!