Extra Extra: The Material History of the Visually Altered Book
Due Date: 08-31-2023
Julie Park (Penn State University) and Adam Smyth (University of Oxford) invite proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection on the long history of the extra-illustrated book. Extra-illustration had a vital flowering in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, but what are the earlier roots of this practice in medieval and early modern cultures, and what are the legacies today? The editors welcome proposals by contributors from different backgrounds, career stages, disciplines and fields (art historians, book historians, book artists, book sellers, curators and librarians, media studies scholars, and more) to consider the methods, materials, forms, and consequences of extra-illustration as a transhistorical medium and activity.
Long before and well after Richard Bull’s pivotal act of reconstructing James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769) by affixing engraved prints to illustrate its textual body, book readers and makers have added images to preexisting works of writing, fundamentally altering their physical design and composition and destabilizing categories of book, art, and object in doing so. How might we consider, for instance, medieval books, continually modified by their owners with added images and text, or the contemporary artist’s book, frequently an alteration of a previously printed book object through added visual elements, as forms of extra-illustration?
How might we think of extra-illustration in terms of a series of tensions: between amplification (the book extrapolated) and destruction (the book blown up); between the classificatory logic of James Granger and chaos; between order and flux; and between the iconophilic and the iconoclastic? Is extra-illustration an erotic, libidinal process? Is it a respectable activity for a quiet drawing room, or is it, in Holbrook Jackson’s words, “a singularly perverted idea”? What is the extra-illustrated volume’s relationship to the codex: tribute or parody? What is the politics of extra-illustration? Is extra-illustration connected to retreat and consolation, or is it driven by a grasping, colonial ambition? Is it a radical upending of ideas of order and convention, or is it an assertion of hierarchy? How do we read—or how did readers read—these combinatory texts? And are there extra-illustrators who occupy a particularly important place in this tradition—figures like Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland, perhaps, or Richard Bull, or John Kitto?
Please submit proposals of 175–250 words and a brief (one-page) CV to Julie Park (jvp6261@psu.edu) and Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@ell.ox.ac.uk) by 31 August 2023.