School of Modern Languages and Cultures
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Research
Interests
The present literary epoch
has been of exceptional duration: 400 years.
There are many symptoms that it is at an end. The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary
form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from
the new stress on visual-auditory communication. (Marshall McLuhan)
My research activities centre upon word/image interaction
from the early days of printing onwards.
I am interested in the technical conditions that led to the success of
hybrid forms, particularly the emblem book (and related material) in the Early
Modern period, and the bande dessinée today. In some respects I see my work as an attempt to update and
'Frenchify' the ideas of Theodor Holm Nelson and Marshall McLuhan.
More specifically, in the
field of emblematics I have provided a bibliography of secondary sources for
the French emblem (Droz, 2000, with Daniel Russell) and in Emblematics and
Seventeenth-Century French Literature (EMF, 2000) I underline the way in
which an applied knowledge of the subject can increase our understanding of the
works of mainstream authors of the period.
In related studies I have presented and analysed 'lost' texts by Tristan
L'Hermite and Charles Perrault. I am
Assistant General Editor of Glasgow
Emblem Studies, having in particular edited the volume,
Emblems in the Manuscript Tradition.
Following my work on the Glasgow manuscript of Tristan's
emblematic poems (click here).
I have devoted more
time to the quirky poet and am now a member of the comité de rédaction for the Cahiers Tristan L'Hermite. I was heavily involved in the Célébrations
Nationales for the four-hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth (2001) and
was part of the editing team for his Oeuvres complètes (Champion, 1999
onwards).
Bande Dessinée: subsequent to the 1999
and 2001 Glasgow International Bande Dessinée Conferences, I have
published several articles and co-edited The
Francophone Bande Dessinée
(Rodopi, 2005). I am President of
IBDS, an international society for the
study of the BD. IBDS is in the process
of launching an international journal, European
Comic Art (Liverpool University Press), of which I am to be one of the
three main editors.
My current project is The Bande Dessinée, a general
monograph (albeit with a bias towards history) on the subject, as it would
appear that such does not yet exist in English.
I am a member of the Advisory Committee for the
international e-journal of popular culture
Belphégor, and of Textimage. a general e-journal for
Text/Image cultures.
Recent papers have allowed
me to talk about early photography, Barthes and Astérix, rude
seventeenth-century poems, Disneyland and Versailles and unfunny Nazi
comics. My audience has also been known
to contemplate a urinal.
Many of the seemingly disparate strings of my research
interests are brought together in my latest book, Text/Image Mosaics (Ashgate, 2005), a work that compares the
theory, production, themes and reception of text/image forms in the Early
Modern and Modern periods.
