The Illustrator And The Book In England From 1790 To 1914

Based on an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, this handsome book demonstrates taht far from being a 'minor art,' book illustration was a genre of great imagination and equally great beauty.

Combines essays, bibliographical descriptions, and 295 illustrations to chronicle a golden era in the art of the illustrated book. Artists range from Blake, Turner, Rowlandson, and Morris to Caldecott, Greenaway, Beardsley, and Rackham.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well. Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

Hitherto relegated to the closets of art history and literary studies, book illustration has entered mainstream scholarship. The chapters of this collection offer only a glimpse of where a complete reconfiguration of the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts might ultimately take us. The use of the gerund of the verb “to reconfigure” in the subtitle of this collection, instead of the corresponding noun, underlines the work-in-progress character of this interdisciplinary endeavour, which aims above all to discern new vistas while charting or revisiting landmarks in the rich field of eighteenth-century book illustration. The specific interpretive lenses through which contributors to this collection re-evaluate the visual periphery of the text cover an array of disciplines and areas of interest; among these, the most prominent are book history and print culture, art history and image theory, material and visual culture, word and image interaction, feminist theory and gender studies, history of medicine and technology. This spectrum could have been even less restrictive and more colourful if it were not for pragmatic and editorial considerations. Nonetheless, its plurality of vision provides a framework for an inclusive and multifaceted approach to eighteenth-century book illustration. Perhaps these essays are most valuable in the practical models they provide on how to tackle the interdisciplinary challenge that is the study of the eighteenth-century illustrated book. The collection as such is the first formal step in an effort to rethink or reconfigure the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts. It has become clear that the study of the illustrated book of the Age of Enlightenment has the potential of yielding multiple findings, perspectives and discourses about a society immersed in visual culture, skilled in visual communication and reflected in the visual legacy it left behind.

"...skillfully compiled...should be useful to anyone interested in placing his or her studies in the context of printed and bound literature..." --ENGLISH LITERATURE IN TRANSITION 1880-1920