This week my group was asked to create the time line entry for Clemence Houseman's The Were-Wolf. At first I was a bit intimidated by this task, considering that I was not (and still am not) fully comfortable with using the COVE tools to post work and exhibits online. It really helped working in a smaller group, as i found that the three of us were able to clairfy any questions for one another and gage how to go about creating the timeline post. In doing so, I definitely believe that I am now more equipped to use COVE for the rest of the semester, but I do still have some questions regarding it that I'm sure will be clarified in future lectures. As for working directly with Clemence Houseman's text, it made the decision for which text I want to present individualy very clear. Initially I wanted to do my presentation on The Moon Flower by Laurence Houseman, but after being exposed to the background of the text, I have changed my mind and have decided to focus my...
moreVictorian Illustrated Books (ENG910 F2020) Dashboard
Description
Students in Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's English Capstone Seminar at Ryerson University in Toronto in F2020 aim to make a virtue of pandemic necessity by engaging collaboratively and critically with the digital surrogates of a wide variety of Victorian illustrated books published between 1843 and 1899.
Using the interpretive model of image/text/context for both synchronic and diachronic analyses, and drawing on a range of digital tools, this course aims to understand the past through the present and the present through the past.
Our study begins with Charles Dickens's iconic Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas, illustrated by John Leech (1843), then turns to two examples of poetry and illustration: Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," illustrated by Pre-Raphaelite artists William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1857); and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," illustrated by her brother, Dante Gabriel (1862). These mid-century works will provide the foundation for our study of the illustrated books that proliferated at the end of the century. We'll analyze a variety of fin-de-siècle genres and styles, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle's popular detective stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, illustrated by Sydney Paget (1892). Next up is Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, Oscar Wilde's censored play based on a biblical story, which was infamously "embroidered" by decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1894). Fairy tales and fantasies aimed at adult audiences allowed counter-cultural writers and artists to protest existing norms and imagine other worlds; our examples are Laurence Housman's self-illustrated collection, The House of Joy (1895) and Clemence Housman's gothic novella The Were-Wolf, with wood-engraved illustrations by the author after her brother Laurence's designs (1896). The Annancy Stories, a self-illustrated collection of folktales by Pamela Colman Smith, is the first-known publication featuring this Jamaican trickster figure (1899). Students examine the final work, A Christmas Carol: The Graphic Novel (2019), for evidence of the legacy of Victorian illustrated books today.
The following texts are available in COVE (see D2L for the other digital surrogates):
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas (1843): A COVE Studio Text for class annotation
Clemence Housman, The Were-Wolf (1896): A COVE Annotated Edition
Christina G. Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862): A COVE Annotated Edition
Alfred Tennyson: The Lady of Shalott (1857): A COVE Studio text for class annotation
Victorian illustrated books resulted from the collaboration of a number of social agents, including authors, artists, engravers, editors, publishers, and readers. Using the COVE toolset, students and instructor work collaboratively to build resources that critically curate Victorian illustrated books in cultural contexts ranging from the nineteenth century to the present.
We will use the COVE annotation tool to hone our close reading and editorial skills. In COVE Studio, each student will provide TWO TEXTUAL ANNOTATIONS, one on "content," one on "craft," for Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott."
We will use the Gallery Image tool to provide bibliographic and contextual information and iconographic commentary and analysis on illustrations, and to associate these with events in the Timeline and places in the Map.
We will use the Gallery Exhibition tool to critically curate illustrated books in cultural contexts, situating works synchronically, within their originating moment of production and reception, and diachronically, in terms of their ongoing moments of production and reception.
We will use the COVE Timeline tool to provide information about historical events relevant to Victorian illustrated books, both at the time of their first publication, and in their ongoing re-production over time and across media.
We will use the COVE Map tool to associate places relevant to illustrated books and their makers and the cultural contexts that we showcase in the Gallery and on the Timeline.
Galleries, Timelines, and Maps
The most engaging part of our second week for me was the reading on bitextual theory. I was initially apprehensive about the highly gendered rhetoric of illustration studies that the theory emerged from. I found the rigid gender roles and heteronormative signifying to be alienating, and frankly, outdated. However, I was delighted to have my apprehension alleviated and to learn that bitextuality actually subverts this tradition of gendered rhetoric by playing with these gendered categories (i.e. “male” text, “female” image) as discrete, “sexual” bodies that interplay in more fluid orientations. The rhetorical play here on “bisexuality”—in all of its connotations—makes the theory more accessible and useful to me. Working with Victorian texts through a queer-adjacent lens was certainly not something I was expecting for this course, but I am thrilled to be doing it.
It was also fascinating to glean that the queer...
moreToday's lecture was very inriguing as we delved deeper into the relationship between images and texts within Victorian literature. It was interesting to learn about the history and evolution of illustrations in relation to text, for example the transitions between steel-plate etching, wood engraving and photomechanical images. I found both the narratological theory and bitextual theory are quite interesting as they offers us more insight on complex the relationships between text and illustrations and the many different ways the images can portray the text.
The timeline exercise was helpful and engaging in my opinion as it allowed us to briefly explore and learn about each publication which allows us to have a clear understanding of the content of the course from the get go. Having a page where you can quickly find important information about a specific work will definitely have it's benefits for this course. After looking through the timeline, I realized a lot of the works...
moreMy group was assigned to put The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the timeline. Through this experience I was able to see a clear connection between image, text and context. It is clear that the illustrator and author share their individual interpretation of the text. This means that the illustrator creates based on the idea he believes the author is trying to convey, similarly to what the reader does when encountering the text for the first time. This is important because it is often the illustrations that determine how people envision the character. For example, the images Sidney Paget created of Sherlock Holmes went on to influence the way mainstream media views him to be today: a tall white man with mysterious dark features. Although one could come to that conclusion through Doyle’s description, there would be a lot more room for interpretation without images. ...
moreIt is refreshing to analyze illustrations in lieu of exclusively the written component of a text. I find that often the choices of publishers are overlooked in literary analysis and appreciation. The text is a composite whole of written word, illustration, embellishment, and material. Although through a modern lens, such choices seem of little consequence, they are all interrelated. In illustrated books, the illustration and the written text are involved in an interplay of creation, embellishment, and illumination. The origin of the term illustration as a form of illumination or elucidation holds true.
Today's in-class group exercise was a great way to explore approaches to an illustrated text. A text can never be severed from its context within the world. With each respective text that was presented, context played a role in interpretation. An understanding of the method of illustration, the time period, the publisher, the author, and other cultural events ends up being...
moreWhat struck me as most interesting in this week's readings was the fact that illustrations in Victorian books would frequently precede the textual portion of the book being depcited (this practice referred to in Leighton and Surridge's narratological framework as proleptic illustration). This, in addition to learning that such illustrations depicting crucial plot-points in the books in which they were contained were used as marketing tools to pique consumer interest, struck me as an example of what would now be referred to as a "spoiler." That this practice was so common in the Victorian era caused me to consider whether Victorians had the anti-spoiler culture we seem to have today, or whether they were fine with knowing mjor plot developments in books before they read them. The answer to this question could be revealing with respect to broader questions concernng the reative importance Victorians placed on plot, the element of surprise, etc. in literature, and when...
moreThis weeks class was really intriguing to me in a couple of ways. As I mentioned in my blog post last week, I have already read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol a few times, though I didn’t focus much energy on the images in the novella. Doing some more research this week on those images to find out who illustrated them and how he did so was really interesting. I am looking forward to analyzing these illustrations more next week when after rereading the book with more attention to the images.
While I was going over the syllabus last week, I clearly missed that we are going to be reading selections from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes stories are one of my favourite anthologies of all time so I am really looking forward to rereading a few of them! I have read from several different editions of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but none of my editions have ever included many illustrations, so...
moreToday’s class was a more in-depth analysis of Victorian illustration books which I enjoyed greatly. What was most captivating to me was the theoretical concepts we discussed in lecture. I often enjoy learning about such content because they allow me to bring my interpretation of the relationship between image/text to scholarly appropriate writing. In fact, this is something I often struggle with when analyzing text. As Professor Kooistra mentioned, although we have a visual vocabulary in which we use to understand illustrations, that vocabulary, at least for me, is very limited. Therefore, such limitation impedes me from eloquently discussing the thoughts that are forming in my brain. Today’s activity, however, was a great start to getting to both understand the texts we will be studying in the course, as well as learning how to decode such texts when it comes to the style of their illustrations and the themes they apply. Annancy Stories, which was the collection of...
moreAfter the seminar today and the introduction I feel like I am really excited to continue to learn more about the victorian era. There was a sentence today in the zoom call that stood out to me as interesting and it was along the lines of " everything is centred around the victorian era" and while I look back at the course load ive taken to earn my degree I find that it is very true. Many of the texts that i've read center around the victorian era and many of the similar themes can be seen in more modern texts. I look forward to see how these themes intertwine with illistrative texts as it is a field I do not have much experience in. I always found the saying "a picture holds a thousand words" was a bit far fetched because as an english student and a book enthusiast I found words to be much more informative and now I look forwards to the many interpretations that we can find when we put together both texts and illustratives.While I have never taken a course on illistrations I hope...
moreAlthough I have taken a fair share of Victorian centered courses throughout my English career, not one has piqued my interest quite as much as this course. The English program doesn’t offer much variety in the texts we analyze, so I am always eager to explore different forms of storytelling. I find especially with Victorian-period stories, the content tends to be dry and lengthy, and the action is slow burn and heavily influenced by social context. Something I’m looking forward to in this course is seeing that action come to life through art and illustration. Hopefully these specific factors will aid in my previous lack of engagement with historical readings. I am sure this is not the first time it is being said, but it doesn’t hurt that the course finale is centered around A Christmas Carol. How timely for the holidays!
...
morePages
Individual Entries
221B Baker Street is the fictional address of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, introduced as the detective's address in the first Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet. When Conan Doyle wrote his works, Baker Street addresses did not go that high, but as the development of London continued, a real 221B Baker street was eventually created in 1932, originally belonging to a bank before the address was commandeered by The Sherlock Holmes Museum, despite the fact that the museum is technically located a few buildings down the street in numerical order. Even when not addressed by exact location, Holmes’ apartment at 221B Baker Street plays a key role in all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, providing Holmes with with a comfortable place to sleuth, decipher clues, and solve mysteries.
I found this week to be especially interesting because, rather than analyzing a story as I am so used to doing, I was simply asked to research and relay the technical details of my rendition of Christina Rosetti's Goblin Market. What I found so interesting about this was how my rendition had been altered in relation to its original publication, in order to suit its intended child audience. Examining the details of the illustrations - which were devoid of the poem's sexual subtext - really emphasized this fact, and led me to consider how one text can be interpreted for specific readerships. This became even more evident as I was able to look at my peers' curations; there were some that emphasized the poem's eroticism and even others that were only vaguely reminiscent of the original poem. Examining all the editions/renditions allowed me to understand just how versatile Rosetti's poem is; even further than that, these renditions show how much of a cultural...
moreI found the process of curation an interesting exercise because it challenged us to look at texts in the context of their production rather than their textual content. This is, for the most part, the opposite of what we have been trained to do as English students. It was nonetheless interesting to analyze a text in the context of its production: its history, its publishers, its editors, etc. “Goblin Market”s extensive history of reproduction was especially interesting because we got to trace its cultural transformation from poem, to art book, to children’s fairy story, to a Freudian treasure-trove, to pulp fiction and so on. I gained a new appreciation for the knowledge contained in the paratext.
However, this week was also an example of how virtual classes can be a hindrance. The curation exercise would undoubtedly be much easier if we were able to physically access the texts we were working with, rather than...
moreWhile going over the curations for the different "Globlin Market" versions through the years and while studying my own assignment of the Beyond the looking glass rendition of "Globlin Market" I took into account the audience for the poem. Through the years the target audience has been changed even though the text has been the same. Though it was not originally meant for children and was seen as an adult text, through the years it has been interpreted as a childrens text at times. While looking at the different curations for the different versions I noticed that even Playboy had taken the poem and done a rendition of it the same year that it was taken by Beyong the Looking Glass to a be part of a collection of fantasy and fairy tales. I found this very interesting because of the major different in themes. There are really strong erotic elements in the text and which is also portrayed in the Laurence Housmans illustrations which were said to carry a lot of...
moreDuring the virtual presentation of different editions and renditions of “Goblin Market” from Ryerson’s Archives and Special Collections it was interesting to see how many versions of this one text have been published internationally, especially the little pocket version. When tasked with individually curating these different editions for an exhibition, it was a challenge to find precise information because of how many different editions have been circulated over time. Since some of these editions of “Goblin Market” are older, it is missing some crucial information that can make curating these pieces easier such as artists publication dates or even the artists names which may not have been included when published. It was quite a surprise to see how different artists interpreted the poem for their illustrations. Since there was a split market for selling this poem to children and adults, the illustrations do have an impact on how the poem is perceived. There was one version of “...
moreThe process of curating various texts was an interesting and surprisingly varied experience, especially given that the text being looked at was Goblin Market. I had previously studied Goblin Market, but I was not entirely aware of the extensive amount of variations and editions the poem has seen. Through the process of curating and reading about these various renditions, it showed me how much a text can change and develop over time. Goblin Market has been represented as a poem, a picture book marketed to adults, a children's book, a mystery novel, and more. In addition to the different formats and audiences, the images are also different between the versions in order to heighten specific themes and concepts that may not have been pronounced in others. The diachronic model especially helped me understand these changes. My group looked at the various Housman editions of the poem, and seeing the contextual elements around the edition’s creation enhanced my...
more