ABSTRACT
This study provides a multimodal reading of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1899) and its first Italian translation entitled Il libro della jungla published in 1928. It examines the way the semantics and interaction of the verbal and visual modes of representation work, especially in respect to the Italian translation. In focusing attention on illustrations, this study challenges a widespread tendency in literary criticism that has, until recently, treated illustrated fiction as a monomodal genre and effectively ignored or marginalised the contribution of the visual. As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, in one of the rare studies on illustration in fin-de-siècle narrative, states: “[T]he image occupies a secondary and supportive position. Illustration is a charming embellishment, a graceful but inessential beauty added to the letterpress” (1995: 9). Viewing illustrations as mere passive supplements, essentially playing no productive role in the construction of meaning is not only a feature of literary criticism but, as Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have noted, of Western literacy. This follows a logocentric model that has privileged language over other forms of communication. While, as these authors note, illustrations abound in texts used in the early years of schooling, they are used less and less as the child gets older, implying that illustrations are fit only for a “‘childish’ stage one grows out of” (1996: 16).
