M.2.1 A Dance Between Text and Image: The Pictorial Over the Textual in Walter Crane’s Fairy Tale Versions

• Rachel Harris, Concordia University

The Victorian era was a time of state-sanctioned educational reforms, innovations in chromolithography, and alternative politics, where images made children's books increasingly prevalent. Contributing to these developments, artist Walter Crane (1845-1915) radicalized the colourful children's books and fairy stories that entered the book market. For his part, Crane was a committed socialist and a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement who saw the educational potential of the arts to guide society towards a socialist future. Yet the text-to-image dynamic in Crane's toybooks tells but a part of the story for their reader-viewers readily assumed to be children alone. To better understand the pictorial power of Crane's full-page illustrated toybooks for children and adults alike, we must look at his politized oeuvre alongside nineteenth-century illustrated interpretations of well-known fairy stories such as Cinderella and Beauty and The Beast.

The visual impact of Victorian-era illustrated books comes to light through the range of pictorial interpretations of textual narratives alongside the cross-fertilization of images between genres. In the case of Crane, the inter-genre dynamic appears by cross-analyzing his illustrations for political magazines and children's books. In so doing, the allegorical figures of Capitalism, Socialism, Freedom, and Labour found in his overtly political illustrations become part of the artist's message that utopian socialism can make space for workers worldwide. Across Crane's toybooks—Cinderella (1873), Beauty and the Beast (1874), Little Red Riding Hood (1875), Sleeping Beauty (1876), Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1876), and Jack and the Beanstalk (1895)—his political message travels between two types of publications, the political serial and children's books. Unlike other illustrated versions of these fairy tales, in Crane's, the subtly edited text concedes space to his full-page colour—amplifying the illustrator's socialist metanarrative in the dance between text and image. Ultimately Crane's toybooks offer an unexpected visual stream of nineteenth-century radicalism.

keywords: Illustrations, picturebooks, Victorian, Walter Crane, Socialism

M.2.2 From Art to Life: Faith Ringgold’s Flights of Imagination

• Charles Reeve, OCAD University

“Write your own damn self,” the activist lawyer Florynce Kennedy retorted when Faith Ringgold lamented her sparse coverage—and write Ringgold did, from children’s books (starting with the acclaimed Tar Beach) to a critique of her daughter Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman to the autobiography We Flew Over the Bridge. Yet these books neither initiate nor circumscribe Ringgold’s literary activity: before writing books, she augmented her art with text—tentatively (her “American People” series in the 1960s), then stridently (the “Feminist” series of the 1970s), then expansively (the “Women on the Bridge” series in the 1980s).

keywords: Faith Ringgold, children’s books, quilts, autobiography

M.2.3 Lines and Bodies: Perturbing the Relationship Between Image and Text

• Rachel Anne Farquharson, OCAD University

The flatness of an image interferes with the perceived “truth of objects”—a continual attendant anxiety of the visual literary arts. A human’s perception of figurative flatness is all the more charged in relation to their own body—that is, one must grapple with the “metaphysics of human interiority”. In illustrated books, where first-order symbols such as drawings are contrasted with the abstract and somewhat detached second-order symbols of text, readers are awakened to a powerful and bewildering dissonance: the anxiety of the flat. Here, the depth of dimension evoked by prose releases the visual from the responsibility of the ‘real’, precipitating confusion in the body’s sensory cognition.

John Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland [1865] prove instrumental in revealing alienating visual devices accompanying imaginative stories and illuminate the dynamic between author and artist in a manuscript’s completion. Drawing closer to the present, the idiom in which artist/writers like Max Ernst, Kara Walker, Henry Darger, and Edward Gorey create their work owes its superstructure to the paradox between the truth of being and the false promises of images when informed by the verbal. An oversight of scholarship—which will be the focus of my talk—is the way in which the paradox between text and image can provoke the body. The nappy hair, scrawny limbs, and voided black body of Walker’s Negress mistress exhume uncomfortable racist imagery from African American folktales popular during the 19^th century. Darger’s The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal [1940-60] ignites the intellectual riddle of narratives turned both familiar and fear-provoking by accompanying imagery. The consequential mixture of attraction and anxiety is a bodily reaction that arrives unconsciously through a progressive journey between the spaces of visual culture, prose, and two-dimensional illustration.

keywords: flatness, phenomenology, self-reflexivity, text, illustration