Project Details
Projekt
Schema with Variations: International Layout Standards and Local Text/Image Idioms in Illustrated Journals between 1850 and 1880
Applicant
Privatdozent Dr. Andreas Beck
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
from 2019 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262766954
By the end of the 1850s, cliché-based illustration printing had already become rare in journals, with the upshot that international, xylographically illustrated journals no longer had a uniform visual or thematic style. This project traces this transformation in textual and pictorial design and follows the history of journal illustration beyond the 1830s and 1840s into the last quarter of the 19th century.The project’s premise is that the verbal and visual differentiation that it investigates inEnglish, French, and German journals, following the pattern of examples such as the Illustrated London News, takes place on the basis of a text-image syntax that is markedly different from the syntax prevalent in the first half of the century. The project reconstructs a fundamental feature of this new means of generating meaning through the composition of illustrations and typography, namely that, from the 1860s at the latest, a relatively small number of established international layout patterns came to regulate the visual design of the illustrated journal (double) page (spread). The project will show that it is through particular variations on these schemas that individual illustrated periodicals came to assert themselves as sites of negotiation in which local verbal and visual idioms emerged against the backdrop of an international layout transfer process.The project develops a nuanced catalogue of the layout schemas common in journals such as the Illustrated London News by around 1865. It reconstructs their emergence in the 1850s and assesses their temporal, local, quantitative, and thematic usage between 1850 and 1880. Building on these analyses, close readings will examine various forms of semanticisation of these layout patterns and their function as implicit instruments of communication facilitating close interaction between text and image elements, even in cases of thematic heterogeneity and spatial distance. These case studies focus on how variations in mise en page practices highlight the specific qualities of illustrated journals in contemporary image media constellations—how, for example, they relate different modes of image production to xylographic capacities of journals. In addition to considering how the dynamics of woodcut subjects is emphasised over static photographic subjects by means of (double) page layouts, the project also explores how the weekly illustrated newspaper, as a generic format with affinities with both daily newspapers and illustrated books, plays host to a tension between ephemerality andpersistence through the variation of illustrated layout schemas. This tension will be examined by way of the theme of "war" which plays a central role in the study. The theme makes it possible to show the possibilities and limits of the new text-image syntax of illustrated journals as they attempt to strike a balance between the topicality of the daily newspaper and the prestigious commemorative culture of illustrated books.
DFG Programme
Research Units
