"A collection of essays by eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology that track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great's Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of the Orthodox Church"--Provided by publisher.

Poetics of the Iconotext makes available for the first time in English the theories of the respected French text/image specialist, Professor Liliane Louvel. A consolidation of the most significant theoretical materials of Louvel's two acclaimed books, L'Oeil du Texte: Texte et image dans la littérature anglophone and Texte/Image: Images à lire, textes à voir, this newly conceived work introduces English readers to the most current thinking in French text/image theory and visual studies. Focusing on the full spectrum of text/image relations, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to digital books, Louvel begins by introducing key terms and situating her work in the context of significant debates in text/image studies. Part II introduces Louvel's s typology of pictorial saturation through which she establishes a continuum along which to measure the effect of the most figurative to the most literal images upon writerly and readerly textual 'spaces.' Part III adopts a phenomenological approach towards the reading-viewing experience as expressed in conceptual categories that include the trace, focal range, synesthesia, and rhythm and speed. The result is a provocative interplay of the categorical and the subjective that invites readers to think at once more precisely and more inventively about texts, images, and the intersections between the two.

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts – from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

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.

According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of »clothing« sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art.