Word and Image in Literature and the Visual Arts

Ever since antiquity poetry and painting have competed for cultural primacy, and intellectuals from Simonides of Ceos to W. J. T. Mitchell have incessantly renewed the debate over the peculiarities of the two arts and their distinctive features and functions. On the other hand, in the practices of verbal and visual representation the two media, words and images, have always tended to support and supplement each other in a variety of ways, from ekphrasis to its counterpart, illustration. The present collection of essays investigates a variety of forms and aspects connected to this interaction by exploring an assortment of past and present cultural artefacts pertaining to arts and expressive modalities such as film, photography, fiction, poetry, drama, television, graphic novel, digital humanities, Renaissance emblematics and early-modern scientific writing.