Analyzing the various different illustrations in different printings of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market was really interesting this week. I won’t lie, I’ve read Goblin Market in the past, and it was not one of my favourite works, but looking at so many different versions of the poem with incredibly different artwork really enhanced my understanding of the poem and helped me see it in a new light. I was particularly interested in the way Playboy Magazine’s version of the poem completely changed where the emphasis lied within the poem. By including erotic paintings by Craft, who specialized in fantastical art, the story was turned into an erotic, almost pornographic tale, turning many of the scenes in the poems into sexual acts. When I first read Goblin Market, this was nothing like the version of the scenes I had in mind, so it was really interesting to see how by shaping the way these scenes are visualized, the meaning behind the text can be completely altered without changing any lines of the actual poem. In contrast, there were versions of the poem published that emphasized the whimsical, fairy-tale elements of the poem, marketing the story to children rather than Playboy readers while still changing next-to-nothing about the text itself. It was so interesting to me how the poem could be marketed in such entirely different ways all by changing the illustrations.