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/fantastical image to gaze over and think about before reading the text. Furthermore, it is interesting when we notice that some aspects of the illustration are never mentioned in the story even though Housman himself could have included them in both text and image. For example, in “The White King” as discussed in the presentations, the text does not mention that the minstrel plays a mandolin, but he does include it in the illustration. Thus, Housman is able to fill the gaps between those small details he missed in his story by including them in his illustrations in order to help make his story more detailed and completed. In this case, including the mandolin gives context to the role of minstrels as medieval singers/musicians.