James Thomson\ s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842

Jung, Sandro

ISBN 10: 161146319X / ISBN 13: 9781611463194

Editore: Lehigh University Press, 2021

Riguardo questo articolo

This book investigates the cultural afterlife of James Thomson s The Seasons (1730) by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.KlappentextrnrnThis book investigates .

Codice articolo 746825039

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: James Thomson\ s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842
• Editore: Lehigh University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2021
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 161146319X
• ISBN 13: 9781611463194
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem’s cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions’ publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

Informazioni sugli autori

Sandro Jung is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Sandro Jung is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.