Abstract On 20 March 1703, the jurist, bibliophile and antiquarian Nicolas Joseph Foucault wrote to his friend, the collector François-Roger de Gaignières:

Abstract In 1853, Louis Hachette published Louis Enault's French translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the yellow cover Hachette reserved for litteratures anciennes et etrangeres,1 La Case de l'Oncle Tom ou Vie des Negres en Amerique was part of his Bibliotheque des chemins de fer. This railway library was an obvious attempt to attract a new reading and travelling public. And La Case de l'Oncle Tom did capture an eager reader in a young Dutchman who found in it comfort for himself first as an evangelist and later as an artist.

Abstract Investigation into the relationship between works of art and their titles is at a very early stage, with such studies as have been undertaken tending to be theoretical, utilizing specific examples only where these have helped to elucidate general points.1 What has emerged from these pioneering examinations is the insistence that titles do act as generators of meaning and can guide the spectator towards a particular reading of a work. A painting will be apprehended differently if given a new title. There is not complete agreement about the operation of this procedure but titles are perceived of as part of the overall aesthetic experience. The generalized nature of the initiating studies has been appropriate, but it now seems reasonable to attempt an intervention which concentrates on the concrete examples furnished by a particular artist.

Abstract Gustave Dore stands alone at the junction of literature and art: no other artist has done so much to create and establish the iconography of central texts of the western literary tradition. And yet, although generations of readers have enjoyed and absorbed this prolific illustrator's work, scholars virtually ignore him. His images have been condemned as mediocre, or worse yet — in this self-consciously revolutionary age — ‘literal.’ Closer inspection, however, belies these charges: in fact, Dore's pictures1 interpret independently and intelligently, affording the astute reader/viewer a dimension of enjoyment and challenge beyond the text itself. This paper aims to demonstrate Dore's subtlety and expressiveness by examining how he strays from Dante's indications in two of his illustrations for the Inferno, and how he shatters, creates, and redefines meaning by doing so. Comprehending the impossibility of translating both the letter and the spirit of such a complex text into a visual medium, Dore opts for thematic fidelity over narrative accuracy.

Abstract This is the claim the early Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777- 1810) made in a letter of 9 March 1802 to his brother Daniel. Whereas this letter has been given much attention by Runge scholars and is considered to be a programmatic text outlining Runge's art theory, the particular statement on Raphael has not been explained. What did Runge mean by it? In this essay I hope to demonstrate that an investigation of the subtly changing meanings which Raphael's Sistine Madonna (figure I) had for Runge leads to a better understanding of Runge's art and theory.

Abstract This book consists of 29 essays intended to represent some of the ‘best feminist art-historical writing’ of the 1980s. As such it functions as a companion volume to the distinguished Feminism & Art History: Questioning the Litany (Harper & Row, 1982), compiled by the same editors, which draws on feminist art history of the 1970s.

Abstract In 1983, I entered the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (as a transfer student) and majored in English (literature and creative writing) with a minor in fine art photography. I was, in a sense, a subject torn between two languages, one primarily visual, the other primarily written. Both these languagescould, at any given time, be either expressive or crtitical, or a combination of the two. However, this sense of being torn between languages may have been self-imposed, or, possibly, culturally imposed. The dominant school of photographic thought when I was an undergraduate emphasized the autonomy of the image.1 My critical work focused on litearary texts, not photoraphic ones. While, in retrospect, I think my professors would have welcomed an interdisciplinary approach, the two languages seemed so separate to me that I could not imagine combining approaches.

Abstract Throughout his work, Henri Michaux makes it abundantly clear that his voice had eyes and his pen painted as it spoke. He was not at all sure which medium he preferred: ‘Lui [Michaux] n'est pas du tout sûr, et il ne le sera jamais, que l'écriture soit le moyen le plus satisfaisant de communiquer ce qu'il a à communiquer’ (p. 116).1 His writings and paintings are essays in self-discovery: ‘J'écris pour me parcourir. Peindre, composer, écrire: me parcourir. Là est l'aventure d'àtre en vie’ (p. 142).2 They represent a tentative, kagile, but cruelly insistent interrogation of the kaleidoscopic paroxysms of his inner world of pain and suffering which encapsulates the often sado-masochistic emanations of his imagination in forms of art magical enough to exorcise and neutralize the violence of the outer world. His technique of scratching, blotting, extending and connecting images by often haphazard associations led him to imagine a pseudo-school of painting he called ‘le fantomisme’ or ‘le psychologisme’. Michaux wished to discover and fix on paper the innermost feelings of others: ‘Moi, ce que je voudrais, c'est peindre la couleur du temperament des autres. C'est faire le portrait des tempéraments’ (n.p.).3 These masks of others, appearing as monstrous heads or contorted bodies, function as mirrors of the self as seen from within, from behind the mundane personae, and become, in themselves, artistic masks for the poetpainter. In his written work, as in his paintings in ink, watercolor, tempera, acrylic, oil or lithographic print, random violence is tempered by aesthetic control; flowing ambiguities are forced into shapes both fantastic and vaguely recognizable.

Abstract The visual images produced mentally by readers have been more or less ignored by contemporary literary scholars and theorists, even in their studies of the reader's interactions with the text. In many cases, they regard these readerly images as mental fluff, inconsequential will-o'-the wisps that drift in and out of consciousness. Such individuals, whether they practice psychoanalytic, socio-cultural, deconstructionist, or rhetorical modes of criticism, undervalue the image because they attend exclusively to the linguistic dimension of readers and texts. They are in effect blinded by the linguistic elements of sound, meaning, and graphic inscription.