Andrea Zemgulys

"For Insufficiency: Literature, Worlding, and Graphic Arts in Late Modernity” 

With a UMIH summer fellowship, I will focus on one chapter of a study of four innovative book illustrators from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who each present cases for illustration as a form of meaningful reception of literary texts. Because of a mass market in affordable illustrated paperbacks, advancements in photo-reproduction technologies, and consequently, growth of a market in affordable “deluxe” editions, it has been customary in modern literary studies to treat illustration as decorative or at best supplementary to, a novel, poem, or non-fiction work. Illustration that is valued in itself as creative/autographic expression, especially if the work of the literary author or a product of close collaboration, is typically disarticulated from the meaning and reception of primary texts by a collectors’/curatorial-institutional market of rare books. The four book illustrators I study, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Yoshio Markino (1869-1956), Wanda Gág (1892-1946), and Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) are graphic artists whose illustrations are rich with significance and offer commentary on the major works and genres of literature that inspired their visual interpretations. These graphic artists all lived lives punctuated and structured by global geopolitics (empire, war, migration) and took as their occupational tasks imagining alternative worlds through illustrating literature of the past both distant and recent, from folklore to nineteenth-century novels and travel essays. My fellowship time will be devoted to studying Fritz Eichenberg, who illustrated new editions of major literary works of the past, what came to be known as “world classics.” As a convert to Quakerism, ethnic Jew who fled to the US from rising nationalism in 1920s Germany, and illustrator for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker through the 1970s, Eichenberg developed a visual aesthetic of protest that was deeply informed by centuries of European autographic tradition and iconography and by the narrative tradition of fable. As a wood engraver, he produced illustrations for limited editions of novels by the Brontë sisters and English-language translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Reading Eichenberg’s book engravings through his aesthetic of protest, we see how illustration enhanced a fabulist character of the “classics,” constructing a sense of timelessness for these modern novels embedded with commentary on evils particular to the twentieth century.  

Andrea Zemgulys is an Associate Professor of English Language & Literature and Women's & Gender Studies.