ABSTRACT
Founded in an age of escalating technological advancement and fixation, the Illustrated London News – site of new mediations between such categories as the art of wood engraving and the dissemination of news – embodies what would appear to be competing aspirations. The notion of a necessary connection between the literary or artistic product and the materiality of its production is, of course, nothing new. Within the broad context of visual representation alone, the ‘new’ art history can be viewed as a concerted if not yet fully developed effort to propagate an awareness of the artwork’s production and the consequent political implications for the perceiver. Coexisting under the aegis of the illustrated periodical, forms such as the poem or the engraved picture are invariably redefined according to the way they are embedded in, or received as constituent parts of, the newspaper.
