Woodpeckings: Victorian prints, book illustration and word-image narratives

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Woodpeckings Conference Image

Friday 16th – Saturday 17th June

9am-5pm

Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum

 

Register here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/dalziel/2017/02/22/woodpeckings-victorian-prints-book-illustration-and-word-image-narratives/

Organised by the Dalziel Project

This two-day event presents new perspectives on Victorian prints, book illustration and word-image narratives, brought into dialogue with scholarly interpretations of the Dalziel Archive, a phenomenal resource for researchers of nineteenth-century prints.

The Dalziel Archive has been made newly accessible through the Dalziel Project, funded by the AHRC. The Dalziel family led the most substantial London firm of wood engravers; they were, to borrow the contemporary slang, prolific “woodpeckers”, or “peckers”. At this time, wood engraving was the chief medium of mass production, profusely illustrating books, periodicals and ephemera: everything from Dickens and Trollope to fitness manuals and chocolate advertisements… Between 1839 and 1893 the Dalziels made around 54,000 prints, including all the wood engravings for Lewis Caroll’s Alice books, and Pre-Raphaelite wood engravings after John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones.

Our conference brings this new material into the rich field of word-image scholarship. Papers range from analyses of pictorial initials made for canonical Victorian novels, to theories of art instruction and interrogations of the album form. Topics include:

  • Medium and replication technologies
  • Relationships between media: e.g wood engraving, drawing and photography
  • Questions of authorship
  • Digital networks and illustration
  • Rethinking pattern and textual ornament
  • Wordlessness and the image
  • Print and seriality
  • Non-authorized illustration, revisions and interventions
  • Tactile reading and the Victorian pop-up book
  • Affective encounters with the archive

During the conference there will be a round table and sessions inviting participants to examine archival material in the Prints and Drawings study room.

Contributors include: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Esther Chadwick (British Museum), Douglas Downing (Independant Scholar), Hannah Field (Sussex), Georgina Grant (Ironbridge Gorge Museum), Natalie Hume (Courtauld), Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Ryerson), Brian Maidment (Liverpool John Moores), George Mind (Sussex), Clare Pettitt (Kings), David Skilton (Cardiff), Lindsay Smith (Sussex), Bethan Stevens (Sussex), Julia Thomas (Cardiff), Mark Turner (Kings) and Kiera Vaclavik (Queen Mary).

Respondants: Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Sheila O’Connell (British Museum), Peter Lawrence (Society of Wood Engravers) and Felicity Myrone (British Library).

Round table: Caroline Arscott (Courtauld), Michael Goodman (Cardiff) and Katherine Martin (V&A).

Generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Museum and the University of Sussex.

@dalzielproject

Register here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/dalziel/2017/02/22/woodpeckings-victorian-prints-book-illustration-and-word-image-narratives/

CfP: Art of Power

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A new, collaborative exhibition, ‘The Art of Power: Masterpieces from the Bute Collection’, will open on 31 March at two venues: Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, and The Hunterian, Glasgow. The exhibition shows a number of masterpieces from the collecti

JohnStuartBute

John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute

on of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713-92), and runs at both venues until 14 January 2018.

Paper proposals are invited for a three-day symposium inspired by themes explored in the exhibition. In addition to the interplay between art, politics and collecting, possible themes include (but are not limited to):

  • Aristocratic and royal collecting
  • Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish identity
  • Mid-eighteenth-century politics and political culture
  • Bute, satire and political prints

The symposium will be held 2-4 October 2017 at The Hunterian and Mount Stuart. Full details, including instructions for submitting proposals, are available here.

CfP: ‘The Unique Copy: Extra-Illustration, Word and Image, and Print Culture’

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The Unique Copy:

Extra-Illustration, Word and Image, and Print Culture

Workshop (Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel, Germany; 24-25 May 2018)

 

Co-organisers: Dr Christina Ionescu and Dr Sandro Jung

 

Is extra-illustration an ornamental art or does it add layers of significance and nuance to the accompanying text? How does it shed light on authorship, the act of reading, book history, and print culture? How does text-image interaction manifest itself in the extra-illustrated book-object? Is extra-illustration the equivalent of grangerising or are there other means of materially expanding the text? Is it a creative act or a form of customised reproduction or reuse of print matter? Who are the artists, readers, collectors, publishers, and curators who are responsible for the creation of extra-illustrated objects?

In his study of the history, symptoms, and cure of a fatal disease caused by the unrestrained desire to possess printed works, Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) observes that “[a] passion for a book which has any peculiarity about it,” as a result of grangerising by means of collected prints, transcriptions, or various cutouts, “or which is remarkable for its size, beauty, and condition—is indicative of a rage for unique copies, and is unquestionably a strong prevailing symptom of the Bibliomania.” Extra-illustration as a practice did not emerge during bibliomaniac Dibdin’s birth century, which witnessed the publication of James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769) and a widespread rage for unique copies of books, nor has it been extinguished in our digital era by modern technology. Whether it manifests materially as a published work that is supplemented verbally (with interleaved or pasted autograph letters, handwritten notes, or print matter either directly or tangentially linked to its content), or visually (with additional drawings, prints, maps, watercolours, photographs, or other forms of artwork that are similarly connected to a variable degree of closeness to the text), an extra-illustrated copy is important not only for its uniqueness as an original artefact and its commercial value as a desired commodity. As emblematic of an artistic, bibliographic, and cultural practice, it sheds light on its creator, the context of its production, and the reception of a text. As a form of personalised book design, it is moreover significant as a means of creative expression, an outlet of reader empowerment, and an archival repository of historical or cultural insight. Some of the popular targets of extra-illustration through time have been the Bible, biographies, historical treatises, topographical surveys, travel narratives, and popular plays.

A plethora of monographs and special journal issues dealing with book illustration from various theoretical and (inter)disciplinary perspectives have been published in recent years, but the subfield of extra-illustration remains largely unstudied. It is important to note, however, the contribution to the field by Luisa Calè, Lucy Peltz, and Stuart Sillars, who have proposed useful in-depth reflections on extra-illustration and grangerising as a practice. To address this gap in current scholarship, we invite papers that engage with extra-illustration through the conceptual lenses of book history, print and visual culture studies, and word and image theory. Contributions that focus on original artwork contained in extra-illustrated copies from the perspective of word and image studies are of particular interest to the co-editors, as are studies of extra-illustration as a link between text, book-object, and context, as approached through the prism of the book arts and reception theory. Other possibilities include contributions investigating extra-illustration diachronically or cross-culturally, and case studies dealing with a special copy, a collection of extra-illustrated books, or an individual collector, publisher, curator, or artist responsible for the creation of such unique artefacts.

Possible themes include but are not limited to:

  • grangerising as a biblio-cultural practice
  • grangerising as a form of material repurposing in relation to print culture
  • grangerising as a fashionable and biblioclastic pastime
  • grangerising as an act of authorship
  • the Grangerite, bookscrapping, and collecting practices
  • illustrative responses to the text in the form of unique infra-textual images
  • marginal illustration and text-image interaction
  • extra-illustration as interactive and engaged reading
  • extra-illustration as emblematic of institutional/curatorial collecting practices
  • extra-illustration as personalised book design
  • extra-illustration as a window into history and intellectual thought
  • extra-illustration as a book customisation response to mass production
  • digital imports of extra-illustration as a means of expression

500-word abstracts, along with the author’s contact information and bio-bibliographical note, should be sent to the co-editors (cionescu@mta.ca / prof.s.jung@gmail.com) by 30 May 2017. A publication on the topic, either a journal issue or a collection of essays, is envisaged.

Picturing the Reader

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‘Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long  Nineteenth Century’

Liverpool Hope University, UK,

7 September 2017

 

Keynote speaker: Professor Mary Hammond, University of Southampton, ‘“French Novels, Lemons and Lumps of Sugar”: reading while travelling 1850-1930.’

 

The long nineteenth century saw a prolific increase in the number of books being produced and read, and consequently in the number of visual and textual discourses about reading. This conference will examine a range of visual and textual iconographies of readers produced during this period and map the ways in which visual and textual representations of readers were linked and mutually influential. Whilst nineteenth-century Britain is a key focus, the event extends to include the British empire in order to explore how representations and understandings of reading differed geographically and were inflected by specific locales. Scholars are invited from the fields of literary studies, art history, social history, cultural studies, readership studies, library history, book history, history of education and history of leisure and recreation in order to foster interdisciplinary dialogues on the subject of nineteenth-century representations of readers.

 

Please submit proposals of approx. 250 words to both Beth Palmer (b.palmer@surrey.ac.uk) and Amelia Yeates (yeatesa@hope.ac.uk) by 10 April 2017.

 

This conference is generously supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and a small number of postgraduate bursaries will be available.

Summer Workshops

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Dr Elizabeth Savage, RIN fellow-traveller and Lecturer in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, will convene two workshops in summer 2017 that may be of interest to RIN members. Full details of each course, including how to apply, are on the following pages:

 

‘The History of Printed Book Illustration’, Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book, 26-30 June

The course is for those who work with early books as in any academic or professional capacity. In addition to seminars and examination of items from Bodleian collections, students will be instructed in the practical processes used to illustrate early printed books, in the Bodleian’s hand-press printing workshop. Practical printing instruction will be supervised by Richard Lawrence.

 

‘History of Colour Printing’, London Rare Books School, 10-14 July

This interdisciplinary, introductory course provides an overview of colour printing techniques in the West from manual techniques c.1400 through the development of chromolithography in the mid-1800s. Discussions will be based on the close analysis of many kinds of content, including text, images, music, diagrams, maps, scientific tools and mathematical figures. By discussing colour-specific issues in the design, production and use of printed material across diverse kinds of content, participants will learn how to identify the most common techniques for printing colour in the hand-press period.

 

Event: Female Networks – British Women Artists 1750-1950 Postgraduate / Early Career Study Day

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brionywickes's avatarThe Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates

British Women Artists 1750-1950
Post-graduate/Early Career Study Day

—-Female Networks—-

University of Glasgow & Glasgow School of Art

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Thursday, 29 June 2017

British Women Artists 1750-1950, a Sub-Group of Tate’s British Art Network was founded in 2015 to provide opportunities for knowledge exchange between University-based scholars and museum/gallery-based curators/researchers and stimulate new thinking and exhibition projects around women’s art works. On 30th June 2017, the University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art will jointly host the Fifth Meeting of the Sub-Group on the theme of ‘Female Networks’, especially the kind of informal networks through which women furthered their study and practice as artists, designers and craft workers.

To mark the occasion, a postgraduate/early career study day is planned to take place on Thursday, 29th June to encourage reflection upon this rich topic in new and diverse ways. Questions might include: Why did women find networking necessary/desirable…

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Gender and Image Workshop

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The Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 will host its 2017 workshop on 6 May, on the theme ‘The Fruitful Body: Gender and Image’.

Attendees are welcome from any discipline and period covered by the group. Each attendee is asked to bring a 5-minute presentation on some topic exploring the workshop theme. Suggested topics include (but aren’t limited to): caricature, texts, novels, conduct manuals, medicine, philosophy, motherhood and women artists.

In addition to presentations and discussion, there will be a keynote address by Karen Hearn (UCL) on ‘Women, agency and fertility in early modern British portraits’.

Full details, including registration information, are available on the Women’s Studies Group website.

Picturing the News

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February 5th marked the launch of the online exhibition, ‘Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism’, co-curated by Professor Cathy Waters and Dr Ruth Brimacombe and funded by the AHRC.

The resource examines the work of Special Correspondents William Howard Russel (The Times), George Augustus Sala (Daily Telegraph and Illustrated London News), and Archibald Forbes (Daily News), and the Special Artists William Simpson (Illustrated London News), Sydney Prior Hall (The Graphic) and Melton Prior (Illustrated London News). In addition to biographical information on these writers and artists, the exhibition examines their artistic practice, the techniques they used, and their influence on contemporary journalism and the ways that readers perceived foreign events.

‘Picturing the News’ also provides a range of examples of the artists’ work embedded within individual essays (which function as clear and well-developed interpretation panels for the various virtual ‘rooms’ or ‘areas’ of the exhibition), which can be expanded and examined in high resolution versions.

 

‘Object Lessons: The Victorians and the Material Text’

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Editors Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton have announced the publication of a special issue of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens entitled ‘Object Lessons: The Victorians and the Material Text’.

According to the editors:

This volume offers a series of ‘object lessons’ on Victorian publications from broadsides to Bibles, asking what the material forms of these texts teach us about their significance in Victorian culture. Some of our contributors direct their attention to the neglected material forms of the Victorian period—the blank journal, the almanac, the broadside temperance ballad, the thumb Bible, the Illustrated London News’s special issue printed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and magazines for blind readers. Others consider the under-studied original material forms of now-canonical texts, including the serial and first edition of Sketches by Boz (1836), the first ‘whole book’ written by Dickens as he emerged from his early journalistic career; the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), whose page layout constructs an active child reader; and the neglected serial edition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), written as a marketable commodity by a writer who scorned—but could not afford to ignore—the commodity market. Spanning a temporal range from the 1820s to 1912, all contributions focus attention on the physical ‘book-object’ as nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers encountered it—in all its insistent physicality.

The full issue is available online at https://cve.revues.org/2861.

Upcoming Lectures

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Two lectures of interest to RIN members and fellow travellers will happen in the next week. If you’re able to attend, please make sure to say hello.

Wednesday, 25 January 2017
5.15pm, Ogden Lewis Seminar Suite 1, University of Leicester
Dr Mary Shannon, ‘From Wellington Street to Newman Street: Or, What Can Cultural Geography Bring to Print Culture Studies?’

 

Monday, 30 January 2017
5.oopm, Senate House Library Room 104, London
William St Clair, ‘The viewing nation in the British romantic period’
(This is the first in the Open University Book History Research Group series on ‘Literature and Copyright’.)