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.

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 I found the rigid gender roles and heteronormative signifying to be alienating, and frankly, outdated.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.

Today'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. 

My 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.

It 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.

What 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 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. 

Today’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.