Faculty of Arts & Science

Visual and Critical Studies

Alexander McIntyre

Presentation of the Fantastic: Interactions between text and illustration in Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books

This thesis investigates the complex dynamic of text and illustration in Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books, primarily illustrated by H.J. Ford. Though this intricate relationship demands careful consideration, the joint study of text and illustration has often been neglected in fairy tale scholarship. Often, either the stories or their illustrations will be the central focus of scholarship; it is less common to consider them jointly. Illustrations are not merely passive reflections of text, and the ways in which they depict and (in some cases) diverge from the text is an integral part of the formation of the text-image-reader relationship. In undertaking a comparative approach to analyzing Lang’s editing and Ford’s illustrations I demonstrate the intricacies of text-image interactions as they pertain to ideas of children, imagination, female autonomy, and stereotype.

“In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. (J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories")”