Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies Sandro Jung This special issue of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik is devoted to the subject of iconological research and the benefits of the study of (book) illustrations for literary studies, especially for accounts that map the marketing, reception, and mediation of literary works. It positions at the centre that which is usually only considered as a marginal phenomenon of intratextual meaning-making: the interpretive illustration, which from the eighteenth century increasingly accompanied editions of literary works. Illustrations represented meaningful addenda to the typographically realised text which they punctuated. The case studies presented in this special issue not only offer concrete interpretations and contextualisations of how illustrations function but they also point to methodologies that can usefully be adapted for use in relation to other illustrations and illustrated works. It is a general preconception that script literacy, the ability to read and write, represented the dominant form and mode through which eighteenthcentury audiences encountered and understood literature. Literature, as in “belles lettres”, was available to a fairly small percentage of the population of Britain, especially if another dominant medium, the printed and bound book, is identified as the primary source and medium of knowledge of and familiarity with literary works. For books were expensive. Copies of the first edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), “adorned with Cuts” and selling at a price of 5s., would have been out of the reach of the masses. The price was certainly not cheap and positioned the work as reading material for the leisured classes, confirming also that even as “popular” a work as Defoe’s did not become mass reading through William Taylor’s “authorised” edition. Richard D. Altick’s contention that prices of the fashionable new literature in the eighteenth century were “prohibitive … to all but the rich” (Altick 1998: 52) rejects the mythified notion of Robinson Crusoe as a work of the people before the late eighteenth century. His research on AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-0001 Sandro Jung 4 mass-reading takes into account the correlation between income, buying power, and the purchase of books to understand how economic access to printed works affected the consumption of literature. Robert D. Hume goes further than Altick when he notes that “the number of families that could afford more than occasional book purchases cannot have been more than about 10,000 or 15,000 at any time in our period. Most book buying has to have been done by the top 1 percent of families, and extensive book buying by the top 0.5 percent” (Hume 2015: 375). Taylor’s printed text was not the only version of the work through which knowledge of the adventurous protagonist would have been promoted; for, as demand for the novel increased, and it was reprinted in newspapers without the copyright holder’s sanction, savvy booksellers undertook to benefit from the media event that was Robinson Crusoe by issuing not only reprints of the complete text but also redactions in the form of abridgments. The latter were published as sixpenny chapbooks, and it is through the proliferation of chapbook adaptations of the novel that the work became more widely available among different reading communities, even though it cannot now be determined which version of the work readers consumed. Those readers who were able, in financial terms, to choose which edition and version of Defoe’s narrative to purchase would have had a range of different “texts” at their disposal. Most of these, from as early as 1719, included illustrations, addenda (including the map in Part 2) that had been part of Taylor’s first edition, and illustrations - at times, large numbers of them, executed as woodcuts - routinely featured in the chapbook versions that appeared from 1722 onwards. These illustrations materialised through different technologies, the copper-engraving capable of creating effects of tonality that the cheaper woodcut could not produce. While illustrations are commonly conceived of as symbolic capital, the comparatively larger number included in chapbooks of Robinson Crusoe indicates that they possessed the essential function of serving as reading tools. The image per text-page ratio in chapbook versions of Defoe’s work is usually high, the 1722 edition printed by E. Midwinter including 28 woodcut images: that is one image per 12 pages of printed text. The 1726 edition published by A. Bettesworth, J. Brotherton, W. Meadows, and E. Midwinter, unlike the 1722 edition, included a frontispiece based on that of Taylor’s 1719 edition, as well as 24 small woodcuts. In the course of the eighteenth-century, the redactions of Robinson Crusoe radically reshaped the original text by omitting more than three quarters of the work, reducing the text to 32 or even fewer pages to issue it as a chapbook. The Banbury printer, John Golby Rusher, issued his 16page version of Robinson Crusoe in c. 1815, and these 16 pages contained five woodcuts, a ratio of about three pages to one illustration, a text-image constellation that contrasts with that of the 1719 edition, where the entire text had been accompanied by a single illustration only. Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 5 The frontispiece to the first edition of the novel had provided a visual synopsis of some elements of the narrative, including not only the protagonist’s civilising the island, but also, in the background, the shipwreck that led to his island existence. This synoptic capturing of different actions and details (such as Crusoe’s dress) was far from unambiguous, however, as the different interpretations that have been advanced of it confirm, Robert Folkenflik arguing against reading the illustration synoptically. He suggests that it is “based on a particular episode” (311) and concludes: “The ship … is not emblematic of the shipwrecked soul but represents Crusoe’s deliverance in this novel of guilt and redemption - a complete reversal of how the image is normally read” (312). Janine Barchas also recognises the “interpretive dissonance” (42) of the scene depicted, and while supporting the view that it represents a “summary frontispiece” (47), she nevertheless insists that it “proves irreconcilably out of step with the modernist realism and novelistic ambitions of Defoe’s text” (47). So, the addition of the frontispiece was certainly meaningful, as the image was specifically produced for the novel and reflected intentionality, but the exact signification of the illustration, which has also been read as an authenticating author portrait, cannot be determined. The illustration lacks the descriptive caption that would subsequently be added to most illustrations of Defoe’s protagonist, a paratextual aid that guided the reader-viewer’s meaning-making. Increasing the number of illustrations that embody concrete moments from a work added cost to the production of the print publication and had to be justified. This outlay was negotiated, however, against projected sales and questions that related to the consumption and comprehension of the text-image hybrid. For a larger series of illustrations provided a more textually anchored and unambiguous visual narrative of the text; at the same time, it also catered to reader-viewers who may not have possessed the visual literacy to make sense of the synoptic-symbolic inscription of Taylor’s frontispiece to Robinson Crusoe. The numerous woodcuts in abridgments thus functioned as part of a series the concatenated reading of which provided a reductivist, alternative rendering of the work. These woodcuts amplified the printed text by visualising moments of action and contemplation that drove a visual reading. The series of images transformed the print publication into a picture book where the default ratio of images per page sequence contrasted strikingly with publications that featured more expensively produced copperplates. The latter plates had to be printed on rolling presses, whereas the woodcuts could be printed simultaneously with the typeset text, making the woodcut the default visual medium in low-end publications. If used repeatedly and over long periods of time, illustrations promoted paradigmatic interpretations. They provided a baseline that readers would use to shape and formulate their own understanding of the text. Even though the exact meaning of Taylor’s frontispiece of Defoe’s protagonist has been debated, the reprinting of the image ensured that it became a Sandro Jung 6 mnemonic device that readers would remember, especially since it would be reprinted for more than 80 years - in both Britain and beyond. This visual interpretation represented only one privileged reader-viewer’s apprehension, of course, but the ubiquitous meaning of the plate was not contested until differing visual interpretations were advanced. These contesting designs may explicitly have revisited the same scene but cast the protagonist differently. However, in the first place, the addition or replacement of illustrations was not a semiotically motivated attempt to clarify meaning. Rather, it was an effort, on the part of booksellers, to differentiate their print product from those of their competitors. Above all, the issuing of illustrated works, and especially those that sold well, was regulated by the property value of the work and the publisher’s investment to secure control over the publication of it - that is the copyright holding publisher’s ability to regulate the physical, illustrated appearance of his edition as part of a copyright monopoly. Illegal piracies of Robinson Crusoe certainly existed, but they did not question the super-iconic status of the frontispiece by commissioning new illustrations. Rather, these piracies aligned themselves with the copyright edition, pretending to be further authorised editions, when, in fact, they were not. Editions with new illustrations that were consciously conceived to replace the earlier ones, which had not possessed a high execution standard and looked outdated by the end of the century, were undertaken only in the 1780s. Even though elaborate illustrated editions would be produced of works that would not subsequently be equipped with book illustrations, the largest share of the market for illustrated books fell to staples of the publishing trade such as Robinson Crusoe: it was not only a steady seller, but the large number of publishers undertaking new editions of the work identified continued capital value that could be mined in ever new editions. In the process of seeking to differentiate editions from one another, visual artists in a range of acts of discrimination chose some episodes, scenes, and characters over others: they generated new illustrations which, within the physical space of the printed codex, would be understood relationally, just as much as the designers relationally considered earlier illustrations when deciding which subjects they would visualise for their own projects. Illustrated editions are thus indices of reading experience, allowing - if a text was visualised repeatedly and for different audiences (including readers from different countries) - diachronic views of the ways in which illustrators made sense of the meaning of the typographic text. They are simultaneously part of the construction of an economic canon and underpin the paratextual framing of the aesthetic canon. Whereas literary studies have generally privileged the latter, at the cost of addressing questions related to the production of literature as materially affected by economic processes, increased attention to the competitive marketing of editions and the role that illustrations play in the marketplace for editions of literary Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 7 works and other print publications enhances our understanding of intermedial meaning-making. In fact, the privileging of the typographic text at the centre of script literacy has obscured the actual historical appearance of editions, which are rarely republished with all of their paratexts in modern editions but which repeatedly included instances of figurative texttechnologies such as engraved images. Likewise, literary scholars’ reading for complexity has generally privileged complex, high-cultural visualisations, which have been detached from their contexts of production and consumption, as well as from relationships they would have entertained with other text objects and media. Deracinated, these editions have been elevated as semiotic systems that make possible a recovery of reading experience. Yet high-end editions such as Samuel Richardson’s 1742 edition of Pamela, which featured 29 full-page plates by Francis Hayman and Hubert-François Gravelot, were not representative in the ways in which they presented a literary work, the cost of £1 4s. reserving this up-market edition for the financial elite (Jung 2016: 514-516). In addition, these illustrations required a high degree of visual literacy and immersion in the fashionable consumer culture of the day (which is reflected in the plates themselves) that many readers would not have possessed. This almost exclusive focus on high-end illustrations, on the part of modern critics who are little concerned with the recovery of historical reading practices, rather than with an individual case study, has culminated in a decentred approach. Such an approach relegates to secondary importance the majority of book illustrations and illustrated works, as well as such central practices as the reprinting of illustrations. For a literary history that pays attention to the dynamic formation of literary reputations, however, illustrations represent metacritical interventions that represent, comment on, and make sense of literary texts on their own but also in relation to contexts of their marketing and dissemination. They are just as much part of the reading of literature, although readers engaging with them (and, through them, with literary works) are reading at a remove from the typographic work. Yet this second-degree reading history is decidedly more tangible than the often fragmentary traces of reading experience that can be recovered through studies of annotation and personal recordings of responses to particular works. They involve two specific kinds of literacy, as well as the ability to read intermedially. Assuming that book illustrations were produced to be understood (rather than considered as merely ornamental) by their beholders, it is likely that artists had in mind a particular audience that they were confident would be able to decode the visual meaning of their designs. The simpler woodcuts that accompanied chapbooks were less demanding in what their designer intended and were able - given the constraints of the medium - to convey but also in what he expected his reader-viewers to attribute in terms of meaning. Like the particular printed texts they accompany, printed images need to be understood in light of their own particularity, Sandro Jung 8 ideally both synchronically and diachronically, as well as in which ways they relate to existing models of visual interpretation. Yet, scholars need to mitigate readings of particularity against contextual readings, including the reuse and appropriation of existing illustrations, which often run counter to a reading for uniqueness - since the reprinted image is no longer unique, although it may have appeared such to readers. Reading an illustration for its supposed uniqueness as opposed to its ability to evoke more generally modes and kinds (as opposed to specific interpretations) may not recover the designer’s intention or how this historical reader chose to translate visually that which appeared important to him. In fact, illustrations do not always entertain a synchronised relationship with the text they visualise but one that complicates meaning and interpretation. Book illustrations have recently been defined as “a portal between the text and its cultural context” (Haywood, Matthews, and Shannon 2019: 5). The methodologies to recover the “portal” function necessitate that reading be understood as a process that requires various levels of competence to unravel discursive constructions in different modes and media. Illustrations are acknowledgments of the symbolic or real capital value publishers assigned to the text for which they commissioned them, irrespective of whether they expected a shortor long-term return on the investment in an illustrative apparatus. They are devices that advertise the work they frame, relating the typographical text to a sphere of the visual that is extratextual but, at the same time, relies for its comprehension on shared competence. Like systems of literary genre, illustrations relied on (iconic) conventions and devices that allowed artists to deploy a visual language of gesture, objects, and activities that was expressive of different modes, ranging from the tragic to the pastoral. The four articles in this special issue address different aspects of how the study of book illustrations can usefully complement examinations of textual framing and reception that contribute significant metacritical insight into the meaning of the works they visualise. They demonstrate the use of conventions deliberately chosen for a particular text that support the generic understanding of the work, while also impressing upon readers the need to understand illustrations relationally, as part of readers’ prior experience of and embeddedness within visual culture. So, illustrated works train ways of seeing as much as ways of apprehending narrative action and character delineation. They provide an aid to readers’ visualising and mental embodying of typographic text. The opening essay by Russell Palmer introduces the first ever consideration of the illustrations of the 1791 Dutch edition of Robinson Crusoe published in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, an illustrated venture which provides a map of the unknown artist’s engagement with the archive of illustrations that had been produced in Britain and abroad since the first publication of Defoe’s novel. Palmer embeds his discussion of the plates within a narrative of how repeatedly illustrated moments are rendered differently over time Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 9 to affect the ways in which readers make sense of the image-text construct. He offers a systematic account of the relationship between the plates in the 1791 Amsterdam/ Rotterdam edition and those published in the first Dutch edition of the work but also others. The result is an essay in transnational illustration research, which does not trace the mobility of images as much as the ways in which the redaction of existing visual apparatuses or the departure from previously paradigmatic visual-interpretive castings of Robinson Crusoe creates new modes of apprehension through which to read the illustrated work. Palmer’s diachronic study relativises the previously almost exclusive focus on British illustrations by documenting that, far from emulating earlier British plates and occupying a derivative position within the illustration history of Robinson Crusoe, the Dutch illustrations were critical interventions that were not, at all times, synchronised with the text they accompanied. In fact, the illustrative apparatus in the Dutch edition functions as a commentary which creates and develops emphases that reinforce or altogether change Defoe’s textual meaning, in the process providing a subtle critique that attentive reader-viewers may have gleaned from their thoughtful contemplation of the plates. In its focus on how illustrations resist synchronised readings - an object of much illustration research that highlights the harmonious intermedial relationship - Palmer’s essay points to an element of the text-image dynamic that has largely been obscured in work that concentrates on a single illustrated edition: the importance of establishing related and relational contexts that facilitate a more complex understanding of the intermedial, critical reception of literary texts. The following chapter, on the 1793 up-market quarto edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons, continues the relational contextualisation of a visual apparatus. It examines the set of plates commissioned for the volume and argues for the plates’ representing a critical counter-model to illustrations included in earlier editions. The critical-interpretive function of book illustrations, which is seldom explicitly described or theorised in the period, is explored in the context of a rare and hitherto neglected critical essay, published in 1803, on the function of engraved illustrations that focuses on an edition of The Seasons issued in the late 1790s. Issued by the Scottish firm of Robert Morison & Son of Perth, the 1793 edition boasted plates by two London artists who provided designs that, in terms of their subject matter, departed from prevailing, dominant visual narratives that had been popularised in London. Whereas earlier editions and those with which Morison’s competed in 1792-1793 had aligned themselves with an emphasis on the interpolated tragic-sentimental episodes that had featured centrally in book illustrations since 1778, the plates in Morison’s volume centred on subjects that had not largely been visualised before. In yet another respect, these illustrations differed from those included in competing editions, for they featured poetry captions that allowed only a partial textled interpretation of the subjects depicted. These ambitious genre paintings Sandro Jung 10 in engraved form offer narratives far more complex than the vignettes or captures of a single scene or moment that had characterised earlier plates. The article embeds its discussion within the contexts of the marketplace for illustrated editions of The Seasons, paying particular attention to the Morison firm’s striving for innovation, as part of its cultural-patriotic programme. This seeking to excel on the British book market is linked to the firm’s national, Scottish ambition to produce an edition that would outdo all editions produced in England. The illustrations were an integral part of this venture, and even though they grew out of a visual culture largely centred in London, their difference in subject, format, and mode presented them as advancing a new visual interpretation that would even affect the production of material culture, the plate designs being subsequently adapted for use on furniture fabric. Just as in Palmer’s contribution, the relationality of text and image, but also between different editions, is shown to be essential to an assessment of the critical potential of printed illustrations. In Morison’s case, transnational relations operating between the Scottish and English markets for illustrated editions of Thomson’s classic, as well as the extra-textual use of visualisations of scenes from the poem in the visual culture of the metropolis, are essential to understanding how illustrations functioned multifariously - and not always as entirely synchronised with the illustrated text. Whereas both the 1791 edition of Robinson Crusoe and the 1793 edition of The Seasons had introduced high-end volumes that would have been accessible to only a small number of affluent book buyers and collectors, Eleanor Sleath’s illustrated novel for children, Glenowen, or, the Fairy Palace (1815), the subject of Matthew C. Jones’s essay, includes a fundamentally different kind of illustration. By no means the elaborate copper-engravings discussed in the earlier essays, the smaller and much simpler images included in the edition of Sleath’s novel nevertheless have the ability to serve as visual nexuses of a range of discourses such as Welshness, the East, education, and the imagination, which are visually amplified through these images. Though much more economically produced than the illustrations examined previously, they utilise space convention and architectural structures to reflect particular developments in the novel’s plot. They serve as directional scripts that are not naturalistically evocative of actual loci. Instead, they are inscribed with discursive constructions of the landscape such as the picturesque, which give concrete embodiment to a particular notion of Wales, even though the illustrations on their own lack this specificity that is established only through an intermedial reading of the text and images. The small size allotted to the novel’s characters in the engravings testifies to their integrated role within the landscape or the architectural settings in which they appear. They are not unmistakably the central focus of the images, as they would be in illustrations of children’s chapbooks, but these figures anchor the settings that Sleath’s text defines as both Welsh and eastern, the picturesque of the landscape being harnessed Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 11 as a category used to support the expansive views both of the actual setting and the broadening of the children’s educational horizons. Jones demonstrates that an integrated reading of the typographic text alongside the images results in more than the sum of its parts, for on their own these simple illustrations do not reveal the complexity with which they are imbued as filters of the text, when read through this text. So, once again it is the relationality between the text and the images that conditions the particular meaning that neither the text nor the images alone would convey. These images are relationally embedded with printed images of the landscape that increasingly made scenes and individual loci from across the British Isles available to the middle classes, for instance through the annual illustrated diaries featuring topographical scenes, such as William Peacock’s long-running Polite Repository. The final essay in this special issue, by Kwinten Van De Walle, unlike the other essays, does not focus on book illustrations that appeared in an edition of a literary work. Instead, he concentrates on a set of 12 small illustrations - vignettes - produced by Thomas Stothard, which appeared in the 1821 number of The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, a long-running annual diary that boasted illustrations of literary works. Van De Walle focuses on the relatively uncommon constellation where a literary illustration is accompanied and glossed by only a single line of text. The entire text of the work, which gave rise to the visual series as a whole, is physically absent and needs to be inferred, the fragmentary snippets of poetry underneath the vignettes being insufficient to understand holistically what is depicted. These snippets of poetry, detached as they are from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the subjects of the vignettes in 1821, recreate the novel by highlighting highly focused moments, contained within the physical space of the miniature illustrations at the heads of the diary pages. The visual apparatus contained in the number of the Pocket Atlas upsets the ordinary ratio between text and image by privileging a visual reading of scenes that cannot, at all times, be related meaningfully to the text reproduced, unless this intra-textual reading of text snippets and vignettes be complemented by the extra-textual utilisation of an edition of Ivanhoe. Van De Walle offers a reading of Stothard’s iconic sequence, contextualising it in light of book illustrations contained in editions of Scott’s novel. In the process, he draws attention to how Stothard creates emphases in his visualisation of particular characters, that jar with illustrations made for inclusion in text editions. He demonstrates that the nature of the illustrative apparatus of the Pocket Atlas allowed for a decidedly more critical and subjective realisation of subjects than the illustrations meant to accompany the full-text of the novel. Van De Walle’s essay showcases the importance of different formats of illustrative apparatus as well as how they can function. He reveals that at the time the 1821 number of the Pocket Atlas was published, different visual castings of Ivanhoe existed, which did not furnish a single-minded interpretation of the work. Rather, that illustrated volumes - editions of Sandro Jung 12 the text but also such non-edition publications as the Pocket Atlas - advanced disjunctive and heterogeneous readings, which did not align with one another. The contributions to this special issue focus on issues related to the interpretability of visual text by probing connections that book illustrations entertain with typographic text: they concentrate on phenomena of the process of intermedial meaning-making that are both intra-textual and extra-textual. In the process, they provide contextualisations of the rich relational factors (especially the diachronic archive of illustrations) defining the meanings of illustrations in editions of literary works and in publications such as the Pocket Atlas. The articles collectively argue in favour of a critical function of illustration that expands typographic meaning, at times as a result of competitive marketing strategies, at others in line with different national traditions of representation and ideological inscription, while yet at others through an effort to concretise the abstract in an effort to fix meanings that might otherwise be in flux and ambiguous. These studies provide consideration of how, on the basis of evidence that can be recovered from bookand reading-related information (such as paratexts and epitexts), reader-viewers would have understood illustrated works as a particular instance of textuality that had to be apprehended intermedially; but they will also have realised that each medium demanded its own method for understanding how the illustrations operated meaningfully and that extra-textual relational meaning-making practices depended on the work concerned. The authors of the essays have used book-historical approaches to comprehend illustrated works as media that promoted textual understanding in the literary economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These approaches to the material text have stressed that the illustrations would have been grounded in a visual literacy that was inextricably connected with how texts would have been understood. As a result, the recovery of the materiality of textual meaning will also recover the central importance of illustrations. For these were textual iterations with a difference: they contained metacritical meaning - a version of the work - which relied for its full understanding on readerly attention being focused on the printed image to unravel its textual inscription. Works Cited Altick, Richard D. (1998). The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900, 2 nd edition. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Barchas, Janine (2003). Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Folkenflik, Robert (2016). “The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1822”. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Alan Downie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 308-336. Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 13 Haywood, Ian, Matthews, Susan and Shannon, Mary L. (2019). “Editors’ Introduction”. In: Romanticism and Illustration. Eds. Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-21. Hume, Robert D. (2015). “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power - and Some Problems in Cultural Economics”. Huntington Library Quarterly 77.4. 373 - 416. Jung, Sandro (2016). “The Other Pamela: Readership and the Illustrated Chapbook Abridgment”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.4. 513-531. Sandro Jung School of Foreign Studies Shanghai University of Finance and Economics