Description
Book SynopsisPicturing England between the Wars offers a richly illustrated study of the interplay of word and image in representations of the English countryside, built environment, and domestic space during the interwar period.
Trade ReviewThe study of visual print media occupies a niche at the intersection of art history, bibliography, and cultural studies, and requires expertise in literature as well as an understanding of technology. Stuart Sillars brings just the right combination of these to bear in his expertly researched work. * Johanna Drucker, Art History *
an impressive book that demonstrates how words and images were combined in interwar England to create a complex form of art, communication, instruction, and entertainment. * Hugh Clout, UCL, Cercles *
Stuart Sillars's Picturing England Between the Wars identifies new ways that word and image worked in relation to each other after the Great War, evoking together resonances beyond the capacity of either medium alone, thus giving expression to new and profound feelings in a battered England. Those feelings include not only a collective grief but also a rediscovered and sustaining sense of Englishness. The book shows how words combined with increasingly influential visual imagery to refashion for the middling class a sense of England's past that could be brought into continuity with its present and future, as revealed through the objects and media of everyday life. Sillars writes with deep learning and authority yet with an exemplary lucidity of thought and expression. Groundbreaking in conception, this book is also a pleasure to read. * Kent Cartwright, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland *
Sillars has a rare ability to read print conventionssuch as the layouts, typography, image reproduction technologies, bindings, formats, and other featuresthat orchestrate the relations among texts and images on the page. Whether pointing out the appearance of a modern font, such as that designed by Edward Johnston and familiarized to a broad public through its use in the signage of the London Underground, or a drawing whose tonal value or particular line quality suggest an earlier era of illustration, Sillars shows the reader how the graphical qualities work as cultural objects of production and reception. * Johanna Drucker, from a review forthcoming in Art History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Prologue Part One: Mapping the Imagined Land 1: Some versions of Arcady 2: Searching for a Place 3: Modern Pilgrims 4: Moving towards Truths Part Two: Many Mansions 5: Housing for the People 6: Houses for Moderate means 7: Modernism Part Three: Seeing and the Reading Public 8: Book, Image, and Social Presence 9: Some uses of Imagery 10: Imaging the Classics 11: The Ruralist and the Premier Part Four: Weekly Communities 12: Magazines for All 13: Magazines for Women 14: The Practical Habit: Magazines for Men 15: Air Mindedness Coda: 'Such a crop . . . as never' Select Bibliography
