Visual Words

Literary culture in the 19th century drew on a partnership between the textual and visual. Early in the century the line made by the pencil (the visual/artistic) and that made by the pen (the textual) were united in the Victorian mind. Many of the period's artists, writers and critics saw a common origin for visual and textual graphics (the primary tools of communication in the period) in precursors like pictographs and hieroglyphs. This volume explores these literary and artistic perceptions, and these partnered graphic lines, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It offers a multivalent outlook on a textual-visual relationship that flourished from the early part of the 19th century through to the beginning of the 20th. The "image" of the Victorian text was manifest in various forms: portraits of authors, paintings of contemporary life, graphic illustration, graphic text such as advertising, calligraphy and typography, book binding, and the book as a cultural artifact. While each chapter of this work explores a different aspect of this "visual" literacy, the chapters are linked by key themes and images: the book as an iconic object, the growing graphic presence of text, the role of the graphic trace, the "Sister-Arts/pen and pencil" tradition, and the competition between image and word as systems of communication.