"Illustration and Gender: Drawing the Nineteenth Century."
Beatrix Potter. Pansy (botanical illustration). 21 September 1896. from Victoria and Albert Museum.
Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 11.2 (July 2015). Now available online: http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue112/issue112.htm
Featuring:
Kate Holterhoff and Nicole Lobdell, “Introduction”
Nancy Marck Cantwell, “Waist Not, Want Not: The Corseted Body and Empire in Vanity Fair”
Susan Walton, “Suitable Work for Women? Florence Claxton’s Illustrations for The Clever Woman of the Family by Charlotte Yonge”
Adam Sonstegard, “Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne”
Patricia Smith Scanlan, “‘God-gifted girls’: The Rise of Women Illustrators in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia”
Edward Lear.
There was a Young Lady whose bonnet,
Came untied when the birds sate upon it;
But she said: 'I don't care!
All the birds in the air
Are welcome to sit on my bonnet!'
from The Illustrated Police News 1888. This image shows women arming themselves with pistols, knives, and clubs in order to fend off the "Whitechapel Fiend" - Jack the Ripper.
CFP: “Illustration and Gender,” Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Deadline: March 15, 2015
In Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875 (Ashgate 2012), Paul Goldman calls for an “enlargement” of illustration studies; “[t]he breadth and depth of what exists and remains relatively unexplored is staggering” (15). In response to Goldman’s call and the increasing critical interest in nineteenth-century illustration, brought about by better digital access and the digitization of obscure materials, we are devoting the summer 2015 special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies to the topic “Illustration and Gender.”
The mechanization of print during the nineteenth century led to the proliferation of illustrations that generated cultural and aesthetic ideals and changed social perceptions on issues of identity such as race, nationality, class, and gender. Illustrations filled Victorian print culture, and accompanied novels in both serial and book form. British illustrated newspapers (The Illustrated London News and Illustrated Police News), advertisements (Pear’s Soap), satirical publications (Punch and Fun), and children’s literature, all served to foreground visual culture, ultimately redefining it. The intersection of illustration studies and gender studies occurred not only within the illustrations that accompanied nineteenth-century texts but also outside of them. Although illustrators of the period were largely male, there were several skilled female illustrators including the well-known artists Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter, as well as the lesser known Amy Sawyer, Mabel Lucie Attwell, Elinor Darwin, and Edith Holden.
Illustrations are complex and never synesthetic versions of written texts. They adapt texts by including their own content and exist on the unstable ground between written and visual signs. Combining aspects of art history, cultural studies, media studies and print history, illustration studies are innately interdisciplinary and an increasingly influential subset of visual-culture studies. This special issues seeks to advance not only an understanding of the relationships between illustration studies and gender studies but also ways in which digitization, including such resources as NINEs, Google Books, and Internet Archive, have increased both awareness of and access to nineteenth-century illustrations.