Project Details
Projekt
Text and Image in 'Konkurrenz': Illustrations in Journal Text(ure)s
Applicant
Privatdozent Dr. Andreas Beck
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
from 2016 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262766954
The fourth sub-project contributes to the media-oriented history of the internationally interlinked illustrated literature of the 19th century. Focussing on German, French, and English illustrated journals and books, it investigates the extent to which wood engraving (xylography) led to the development of media-specific illustrative practices. The working hypothesis is that, in the period leading up to around 1850, graphical printing developments, in combination with techniques of composition and printing, not only served to revolutionise textual illustration in quantitative terms, but also led to qualitatively unprecedented, journal-specific forms of text-image relations. The refinement of xylographic printing in combination with set type, improved stereotypes made from wooden printing blocks, and the emergence of alternating double pages with and without illustration led, on our hypothesis, to an ambivalent transformation of the relation between illustrations and text in illustrated journals.On the one hand, the sub-project will attend to the correlations between image and text. Insofar as xylography made the co-presence of images and text on a single printed (double) page commonplace, the question of the proximity of image and text came to be posed-for example by the introduction of iconic-mimetic typefaces. And since through clichés it now became possible to orderly rearrange the elements of already existing illustrated texts, the illustrated journal, as a systematic importer of images, became a site for the construction of coherent multi-modal textual edifices. This establishment of coherence was particularly signi¬ficant in contrast with illustrated books that display a fragmentary character due to their publication as serial works. On the other hand, the sub-project investigates the manner in which the above developments served to weaken the text-image alliance. These developments not only enhanced the inner coherence of illustrated texts, but also resulted in incoherent 'textures' in which image and text stood out as the heterogeneous material from which they were made. The cliché-bound tendency of xylographic printing blocks, together with the strictly applicated alternation of illustrated and non-illustrated double pages facilitated the detachment of wood engravings from illustrated texts; this contributed to an increasing independence of supposedly subordinated images and even enabled the reversal of the previous text-image hierarchy through heterogeneous forms of image-text presentations in illustrated journals.The sub-project thus examines the new forms of juxtaposition, interweaving, coexistence, and conflict of texts and images that emerged with the use of xylographic illustrations in books and journals. It therefore considers the overlapping of these aspects in terms of 'Konkurrenz' between text and image, for 'Konkurrenz' means both rivalry and, as its etymology indicates, also forms of juxtaposition and multimodal cooperation.
DFG Programme
Research Units
