Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture

Emblems and Comic Strips

Laurance Grove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351895637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinée, or French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on primary material from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and from Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production, Thematics and Reception-Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present) to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for diametrically opposed political or religious purposes. The author argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the periods that popularised these forms have certain common features related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinée increases our understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.

Index

1. Académie des devises et inscriptions 16
   1. creation 41
2. Ache, Jean 113
3. Adams, Alison
   1. A Bibliography of French Emblem Books 100, 128, 130, 134, 135, 154
4. advertising 6, 12
5. Aertssen, Henri 100
6. d’Aigaliers, Pierre Laudun, L’Art poetique françois 31
7. albums
   1. Astérix 153
   2. bande dessinée 144–45, 149–50
8. Alciato, Andrea, Emblematum liber 14, 17, 23, 32, 33, 36, 40, 51, 88, 124, figs 1, 5, 41–42
   1. editions 152
   2. evolution 154
   3. themes 95
9. d’Alençon, François 63
10. d’Amboise, Adrian 37
    1. Discours ou traicté des devises 38
11. America, bande dessinée 18–19
12. Ames Vaillantes 19, 177
13. Amours de Mr Vieux Bois, Les 18
14. Andrews, Lew, Story and Space in Renaissance Art 133
15. Aneau, Barthélemy 38
    1. Imagination poétique 89
16. Angoulême, bande dessinée festivals 140–41, 152–53
17. Angremy, Jean-Pierre 141–42
18. architecture, text/image forms in 8–9
19. Aristidès, Fred Othon see Fred Othon, Aristidès
20. Astérix 12, 20, 21
    1. albums 153
       1. sales 153
    2. multimedia versions 155
21. Astérix chez les Bretons 21

1. Baird, John Logie 6
2. bande dessinée (comic strip) 13, 18–21
   1. as adult medium 138–40, 141
   2. albums 144–45, 149–50
   3. Amer...