Today’s class was truly rewarding as we were all able to share our findings and how we were going to incorporate them in our text. I found it really interesting to listen to all the different and even similar routes my classmates took in analyzing their chosen text. Listening to presentations about the works we have covered in the semester was rewarding as it opened up a window into a scholarly conversation based on the works we have been reading this year, and such was rewarding as I was able to learn a lot more historical context based on the texts I did not write my essay on.

This week we discussed Clemence Housman’s wood-cut engraving illustrations of The Were-Wolf. This work initially caught my attention due to its gothic elements which I was interested in exploring especially because it was the only work which included a female were wolf as its main character. During today's presentation, I enjoyed the background information on both Clemence Housman and Laurence Housman's support for women's rights as it definitely shifts the meaning behind a lot of the illustrations.

This week we looked at Oscar Wild's 1893 play Salomé which was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in the English edition. This text was definitely the most challenging text to analyze especially when it came to its illustrations as Beardsley strangely and most definitely deliberately avoided merely reflecting Wild's text. initially I had a hard time understanding the relationship between text and image due to the illustration's ambiguity's especially when I compared it to Sherlock Holmes and how easily it was to understand the relationship between text and image.

This week's reading was truly shocking because of The Goblin Market's versatility in both interpretation, and in audience. While reading the poem initially, I immediately noticed the sexual connotations of the poem especially with the help of Professor Kooistra's annotations. However, I assumed because the poem was so sensual and sexual in both description and illustrations (the ones I had seen from previous readings of the poem) I never thought this poem could be targetted towards a young audience.

This week we focused more on the image and text relationship in The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. What I found interesting was reading my classmate’s annotation on the text and how they interpreted it from their point of view. I was especially intrigued by the historical contexts that one must be aware of (the Victorian period in this case) in order to fully understand and appreciate this story. For example, prior to this week’s class, I had no idea what the “Poor Laws” were, and therefore, did not get the reference when it was used by the character Scrooge.