Balzac, Grandville, and the rise of book illustration
By: by Keri Yousif
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Burlington, VT
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9781409418085; 9781409418092
Subjects: Illustration of books; Criticism and interpretation; Publishers and publishing; History
Description: Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, 'les français peints par eux-mêmes'. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Out of bounds: Book illustration in France, 1830-1848; title: The frames of competition: Balzac, Grandville, and caricature; title: Caging the writer: Les scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux; title: Penning the illustrator: Caricature and illustration in La comédie humaine; title: The illustrator unbound: Grandville's Un autre monde; title: Cat and mouse.