I personally liked Houseman’s fairytales especially as they seemed very different from the other works we’ve read in class. It’s interesting to know that he’d been influenced not only by Oscar Wilde’s arrest but his sister’s participation in the women’s movement. I’ve personally always liked fairytales because they were this space that were catered to children (most of the time) but with Housman actively throwing in messages of shedding the constraints of traditional Victorian notions—it’s nice to see. Fairytales are often dubbed as being easy to remember or that they have common motifs in them. That being said, it's cool that Housman took that assumption of fairytales and turned it on its head - discussing active social issues through "simple" stories. Not to mention that he moves his almost "radical" (at the time) ideas through these seemingly innocent fairytales. I'm enjoying his method of pushing boundaries.

As I’ve needed to present this week, I found that leading...

This week we discussed Laurence Housman’s The House of Joy published in 1895. Before reading the story, I was interested to see how Housman balanced the amount of authority he gives to both text and image in conveying the themes in the story as he himself is both the author and the illustrator. As discussed in the class, the proleptic nature of the image gives a circular experience to the reader as when I first took a look at the images before reading the story, I had a hard time fully grasping what was going on in the picture. However, after reading the text and coming back to the image, the text is able to assist our understanding of the illustration which is pretty neat when you think about how image and text work together to create meaning. This is of course of no surprise especially since Housman himself got to illustrate his book but I also think the circular experience helps further highlight the fairy tale genre the book follows as it gives us a mysterious/...

This week we looked at the 1907 edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome which included 16 drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. I had never heard of this one act play before, so it was interesting to read through it and learn some of the context surrounding the play’s publication. Throughout the course (so far), I can better appreciate the importance of the image, text, and context connections because of all the important relations between the play, the drawings and Wilde’s story of creating the play. It is evident through Beardsley’s drawings that there was a focus on sexuality as a main theme from the play. These black and white drawings include lots of nudity and sexual references. The detail of these photos comes from the outfits the characters wear or parts of the background surrounding them. I found “The Woman in the Moon” to be a very intriguing photo because of simplicity in the outlines of the figures illustrated. Certain parts are shaded in black, but the rest of the...

Today was an interesting day for presentations in class, as we looked at Salome by Oscar Wilde. I had never before encountered the text until this course. What first struck me was how abstract the illustrations appeared, as opposed to the illustrations Sidney Paget created for "The Man With the Twisted Lip"; whereas those were life-like, Beardsley's illustrations seemed far more interpretive. It is unfortunate that Oscar Wilde felt these illustrations were unfaithful to his original text; however, this anecdote proves how illustrators themselves can act as critics for the texts they are drawing for (as was mentioned by Dr. Kooistra).

Following from that, what I found especially interesting about the presentations today was the fact that many of the discussions focused on female sexuality as the central theme of the text. For me, the sexualization of Salome in Beardsley's illustrations was reminiscent of many contemporary films' gratuitous depictions of female nudity...