Fox-Adler lecture asks, "What does it mean to illustrate a book?"
George P. Landow, professor emeritus of English and art history at Brown University, explored the complex ways in which illustrations relate to a published text and frame readers’ understanding of a piece of literature in Skidmore College’s annual Fox-Adler lecture.
In his Sept. 24 talk — “Illustrating Illustrating; Or, What Does it Mean to Illustrate a Book?” — Landow considered how class, gender, genre, the proliferation of paperback books, audience appeal, shifts in the publishing industry and other factors not only have affected the choice of book illustration, but also have influenced the meaning of the text.
Landow is the founder, webmaster and editor-in chief of The Victorian Web, which began in 1987. The site hosts nearly 100,000 documents and receives about 1.5 million page views a month. Landow has written and lectured extensively on 19th-century literature, art, religion, literary theory, e-literature, educational computing and hypermedia.
“‘Illustrating Illustrating,’ a richly illustrated slide lecture, was an invitation to think about the ways book illustration interacts with a written text,” said Catherine Golden, professor of English at Skidmore, who coordinates the Fox-Adler program. “A skillful reader of Victorian illustrations by seminal and lesser-known artists, Landow demonstrated how an illustration, in interpreting a text, at times fights with the narrative or augments it in defining ways, much as Sidney Paget did for Conan Doyle's text in giving Sherlock Holmes a deerstalker hat forever associated with this iconic figure."
Skidmore’s Fox-Adler lecture series is named for Norman M. Fox and Hannah Moriarta Adler, connoisseurs and collectors of rare books.
Adler first loaned her extensive collection of 19th-century books to Skidmore in 1967. After her death, Fox and his family took charge of it and later donated it permanently to Skidmore's Scribner Library.
Landow has taught at Columbia, the University of Chicago, Oxford (Brasenose College) and Brown University. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, twice a Fulbright senior specialist in information technology, twice a Guggenheim fellow, and a fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has received numerous grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
