1. The Arguments against Illustration in Literature Are (to Varying Degrees) Historically Contingent
The idea that literary works should not be accompanied by representative visual images goes back at least to the Renaissance (Harthan 8). Indeed, as we discuss elsewhere on this website, reservations against pictorial illustrations of literature may already have informed Greek and Roman authors over 2,000 years ago. That being said, the extent to which illustration was rejected varied over the centuries and the specific reason(s) for rejection certainly changed. More precisely, while some arguments against illustrations appear to have been expressed in all (or most) periods, others are much more recent and much more limited to specific cultural and historical contexts.
Among the more longstanding, transhistorical arguments, we count especially the idea that illustrations are redundant. While we do not possess an explicit statement to that effect, a convincing case can be made that already authors of classical antiquity thought of illustrations as redundant (Horsfall). On our website, we list just a few other historical examples of the idea that illustrations are redundant, ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
By contrast, we do not find any evidence for the idea that illustrations limit the reader’s imagination before the nineteenth century, and we are skeptical that such evidence will surface—at least in the European tradition. The charge that illustrations limit the reader’s imagination seems to depend on a Romantic exploration of subjectivity; a development that emerged around 1800 and shaped much of the first half of the nineteenth century, as Jonathan Crary and others have shown over the past few decades.
While the idea that illustration limits the reader’s imagination can still be encountered today, other arguments appear to have vanished at some point—or at least become less prevalent. Notably, the argument that illustrations are only included for commercial reasons seems to belong to the publishing world of the late eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century. Indeed, by the second half of the century, the debate on this point seems to have turned in the opposite direction: now, a major reason not to include images was that illustrations made book production more costly (Harthan 278). The claim that illustrations are intellectually regressive, in turn, may still inform some prejudice against picture books today—but one is unlikely to encounter it explicitly in public debates about literature from the last few decades (more on that below). An even more extreme example of a historically contingent argument against illustration stems from late nineteenth-century Japan: as writers aimed to develop a modern realist novel in Japan during that period, illustrations were experienced as an obstacle in that development (see Ramos Bassoe).
Appreciating the historical contingency of the arguments against illustrations is important—and not only to better understand the status of illustrations at a given point in time and place. By highlighting the specific ways in which each period argued against illustrations, we also gain direct access to how each period thought about the value and meaning of literature. In the critique of illustration, writers define what literature does (or should do), especially concerning literature’s ability (and duty) to describe. While there were authors across all ages who spoke out against illustration, depending on when they worked, they did so in the name of literature’s clarity, or in the name of literature’s high cerebral status—or even in the name of literature’s important ability to leave its contents in obscurity. Placing the emphasis on the varying reasons for the rejection of images in fictional texts, a study of the critical discourse on illustrations can produce a new intellectual history of literature.
2. No Period Sees the Emergence of as Many New Arguments against Illustration as the Nineteenth Century
While the critique of illustration is longstanding, many of the arguments against illustration that we found emerged in a relatively specific time frame: the nineteenth century. To be precise, among the twenty distinct arguments against illustration we have identified so far, twelve stem from the time between 1799 and 1895. Be it the idea that illustration limits the reader’s imagination, the idea that illustrations undermine intellectual pursuits or the idea that illustrations unduly privilege or accentuate beauty—all these claims have, as our research suggests, their origins in the nineteenth century.
This substantial share of nineteenth-century arguments is, to some extent, certainly an effect of the biases of our research so far, as well as the focus of the existing studies on literary illustration. As the work on our project continues, we are likely to find some additional arguments from other periods and some earlier examples for the arguments that we currently place in the nineteenth century.
That being said, the phenomenon that so many arguments against illustrations appear to originate in the 1800s probably cannot be entirely dismissed as the result of our biases. The nineteenth century was a key period for the rise of illustration. As John Harthan writes:
Never was there a greater interest in illustration of every kind. Diversity of techniques, the vagaries of literary and popular taste, and an insatiable demand for books, make the nineteenth century the richest period in the history of illustration.
(Harthan 172)
The rise of illustration, however, also meant that writers now faced more direct competition from the visual arts, and this arguably forced them into a reflection on literature as an art with its own laws and goals. Especially for English and US literature, the nineteenth century was a golden age of illustration (in France, illustration blossomed already in the eighteenth century). As the century progressed, the clear sense emerged that literary writing on its own was not enough to attract wider audiences and that texts had to be accompanied by illustrations in order to sell. Indeed, in some cases, illustrations even preceded the texts. Writers were hired to provide texts for images that had already been found. Writing in 1895, Sidney Fairfield went so far as to speak of a “Tyranny of the Pictorial.” Fairfield laments:
With all this space in our publications pre-empted by the pictorial, the gentry who live by selling what they write must take metaphorically to the woods, for the reading public has suddenly become picture-mad. The highest thought, the deepest truth, the most exquisite bit of sustained description, poetry, dialogue, love, tragedy, humor, realism of any kind, all are subjected by the weeklies and monthlies to the tyranny of the pictorial […].
(Fairfield 863–4)
It may be productive to think of the rise of illustration in the nineteenth century as part of a broader popularization of (literary) writing in that period. As is well known, the reading public significantly widened in this period in Europe and North America, and with that, new genres of entertainment emerged, including the adventure novel, the detective novel, and children’s literature. Publishing more illustrated editions of literature was part of that broader development to reach wider audiences—and the discourse against illustration was thus also part of a wider intellectual backlash against popular entertainment. However, in contrast to the new entertainment genres, which brought new income opportunities to literary writers, the practice of illustration threatened to undermine the (monetary) value of writing alone. Writers, especially those of intellectual status, had thus multiple reasons to scorn illustration—as a signifier of trivial literature and a financial threat to their profession. For these reasons, it should be no surprise that writers of this time proved very productive in conceiving new arguments against illustration.
3. Today, the Debate against the Use of Illustrations Has Been Reduced to Variations on a Few Longstanding Arguments.
Historically speaking, the criticism of illustration won: illustrations largely disappeared from serious adult fiction in the twentieth century. At the same time, however, many of the arguments formerly used against illustration have now become obsolete. Other arguments have a shadowy afterlife in a range of academic inquiries, including media studies, literacy studies, and cognitive science. Only very few arguments are still actively used to speak out against illustration.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, illustrated editions of literary texts stopped being a common type of publication. Crucially, modern and contemporary publication practices of adult fiction placed illustrations in the margins, as paratexts (especially as cover illustrations or, as they are sometimes called, point-of-sale pictures). “Today,” as Alan Male wrote in 2019, “narrative fictional illustration is mainly encountered in children’s books, graphic novels and comic strips, and specialist publications such as thematic compilations, containing mythology, gothic tales and fantasy.” Adult fiction, by contrast, “is probably the most under-represented genre regarding illustration either as an accompanying or intrinsic element” (138). Indeed, even those classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that originally appeared with illustrations are today typically published without images.
With illustration being largely removed from ‘serious’ literature in the first half of the twentieth century, the debate against illustration was, for the most part, over. As a matter of fact, it seems to have been buried so deep that it did not even resurface to a significant degree when illustrated editions of literature became more popular again in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (see, e.g., the works of W. G. Sebald).
Moreover, even where we see writers and critics still condemn illustration, no fundamentally new arguments are presented. According to our research, the two arguments that most clearly persist are the very old argument of the redundancy of illustrations and the much newer claim that illustrations limit the reader’s imagination. For example, both arguments are presented in a short newspaper article from 2008 by the prominent German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013). But one may here also think of the fact that Wolfgang Iser, in his 1976 book The Act of Reading (Der Akt des Lesens), contrasts the imaginative act of reading with the viewing of images (222–4). Similarly, Alan Male evokes literature’s affective and imaginative aspects when commenting on the lack of illustration in adult fiction (138).
Other arguments against illustrations have a more indirect afterlife in scholarly inquiries on picturebooks. Perry Nodelman, for instance, contended in his classic study Words about Pictures (1988) that “words and pictures necessarily have a combative relationship” (167). Some of the differences between words and images that Nodelman highlights were recognized before by authors writing against illustration, such as the concern over the (too) specific and concrete nature of visual imagery or the alleged chasm that exists between the relative objectivity of pictorial representation and the relative subjectivity of words (172; on that latter point, see, e.g., James). However, it is important to note that Nodelman, in contrast to the writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, does not present the differences between texts and images as arguments against illustration. Instead, what used to inform the critique of illustration is here merely mentioned to differentiate between various media.
Yet two other spheres in which an echo of the older arguments against illustration can be found are literacy studies and cognitive science. An example of this might be constructed from the scientific studies that show that reading (or listening to audiobooks) contributes to brain development in a manner that cannot be replicated by screen-based media, which, instead, have been linked to health risks and infant brain underdevelopment (see the research by J. S. Hutton and T. Horowitz-Kraus). Perhaps more concretely, literacy studies since the 1960s have found that some children better learn reading when texts are not accompanied by images (e.g., Samuels).
By contrast, several other arguments against illustration appear to have become largely obsolete. Among the list of arguments against illustration in the section Types of Critique, the following claims do not appear to exert any significant influence on the contemporary understanding of illustrations anymore:
- Illustrations are merely included for commercial gain. While this was one of the most pressing points for writers in the nineteenth century, changes in the literary market have made this argument obsolete. Indeed, in the twentieth-century economic pressures seem more likely to lead to the exclusion of illustrations (Harthan 278).
- Illustrations carry no meaning in themselves. This argument, which we first identify in Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), appears to have been abandoned in the course of the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the later concern that illustrations provide excessive clarification of the text indicates that the sense that illustrations have no independent meaning disappeared.
- Illustrations provide excessive clarification of the text. This argument, expressed by Kafka, seems to pertain only to experimental conceptions of literature around 1900. Indeed, so far, we have not found any instance of this argument from before or after the Modernist period. Incidentally, avantgarde fiction of the late twentieth century seems to be rather open to illustration (as in Susan Sontag or W. G. Sebald’s work with photographs).
- Illustrations unduly privilege or accentuate beauty. The emergence of conceptual illustrations (which Alan Male situates after the Second World War), as well as the artistic discussions prompted by avantgarde movements of the early twentieth century, appear to have transformed the landscape of illustrations enough to make this argument obsolete or, at least, not applicable in a broad manner.
- Illustrations undermine intellectual pursuits. The contemporary validity of this argument is slightly unclear. While illustration is no longer considered a “dumb” art (as Wordsworth saw it), there is a continuing underlying sense that books without images are more cognitively demanding and, as commented above, that reading is an intellectually more beneficial activity than viewing images.
Works Cited
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press, 1990.
Fairfield, Sidney. “The Tyranny of the Pictorial.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, June 1985, pp. 861–64.
Harthan, John. The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition. Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. W. Fink, 1976
Horowitz-Kraus, T., and J.S. Hutton. “Brain Connectivity in Children is Increased by the Time they Spend Reading Books and Decreased by the Length of Exposure to Screen-Based Media.” Acta Paediatrica, vol. 107, 2018, pp. 685–93.
Horsfall, Nicholas. “The Origins of the Illustrated Book.” A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View, edited by William A. Katz, Scarecrow Press, 1994, pp. 60-88.
Male, Alan. Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective. AVA, 2007.
Nodelman, Perry. Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Books. University of Georgia Press, 1988.
Ramos Bassoe, Pedro Thiago. Eyes of the Heart: Illustration and the Visual Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature. [PhD Thesis] University of California, Berkeley, 2018.
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. “Die Einbildungskraft ganz frey erhalten.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. March 19, 2008. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/fragen-sie-reich-ranicki/fragen-sie-reich-ranicki-die-einbildungskraft-ganz-frey-erhalten-1516577.html
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