The interaction between text and illustration in the illuminated books of William Blake through his work America, a Prophecy

Author(s)

Andrea Lima Alves

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2007-06-02

Examining board members

Luiz Carlos da Silva Dantas; Alexandre Soares Carneiro; Vera Maria Chalmers; Adma Fadul Muhana; Robert Wayne Andrew Slenes

• Advisor: Luiz Carlos da Silva Dantas

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the nature of the relationship between text and illustration in the illuminated books of William Blake, the set of works written and illustrated by the artist himself, mainly through one of these books, America, a Prophecy. Although attention was focused mainly on only one book, the author searched for the general way in which such a dialogue between text and pictures relate to each other in his work as a whole, as can be attested by one of the chapters where the essential features of both languages in this kind of composite art created by the artist, verbal and visual, are examined. Studies that investigate this question are necessary as the quality of Blake's illustrations is highly allegorical and not obvious at all: they never interact with the text that they illustrate in a direct or indicative way, such as presenting a scene, situation or characters exactly as they appear in the text; the opposite is usually true: the scenes represented in his illustrations contain situations and characters that were not even mentioned in the text, and by so doing they require the reader to search for the possible analogy with the text to which they belong in order to make an attempt at interpretation. This is why the dissertation at hand also presents a discussion of the concepts of symbolism and allegory in the context of Blake's work (AU)