Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores new literary and artistic perceptions, and the partnered graphic lines, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It offers a multivalent outlook on a textual-visual relationship that flourished from the early part of the nineteenth century through to the beginning of the twentieth. The book examines the interplay of text, image and iconography in defining contemporary life in three nineteenth-century English paintings. It also explores the development of an 'art of seeing' for both textual and graphic modes of representation, via the links between advertising, promotion, and the graphic text and artistic print. The book describes a series of vignettes examines the visual impact of books, from their relationship with busts in libraries to their use as symbolic and iconic manifestations of sexuality and death, and as objects sublimating morality and mortality.