This chapter explores the shared circumstances, collaborations, and socializing that drew modernist poets and painters together in New York, but also the critical discourse of medium specificity that insisted on the separation of their endeavors. William Carlos Williams established proximity with the Stieglitz Circle painters, admiring (and occasionally acquiring) their work, which he rendered in ekphrastic poems. While Wallace Stevens’ early career was also shaped by encounters with these artists, his poetry maintained a distance from while suggesting parallels with visual art. The chapter moves from Williams’ and Stevens’ contrasting approaches through Clement Greenberg’s assertions of medium-specificity to Frank O’Hara’s at once intimate and ambiguous relationship with midcentury American painting and painters. O’Hara’s collaborations with Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers suggest close connections but no fixed relationships between writing and painting. The chapter concludes with Glenn Ligon, whose late-twentieth-century paintings catch the messiness of preceding word–image encounters but convey an urgent need for communication that extends beyond the dialogue between writing and painting.

Much can be learned about medieval romances by examining the manuscripts in which they are transmitted. The practical necessity of reading medieval texts in modern critical editions distances them from our only tangible contact with their historical contexts. Few, if any, romances survive in copies dating from a period near their date of composition, so the history of manuscript context is a history of reception. This chapter concentrates on Old French romance, with brief discussion of Middle English, Middle High German, Middle Dutch, and Old Norse. Consideration of the mise en texte, mise en page, and mise en livre of some major works and books which contain them, permits the construction of a model by which medieval romance may be approached in manuscript. Romances discussed include the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and his epigones, the romans d’antiquité and other romans courtois. Briefer mention is made of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the unique manuscript of Malory; the Tristan of Gottfried von Straßburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach; and the texts of the Lancelot-Compilatie.

This introductory chapter contends that reprints are special sites of interpretation, illumination, and reinvention, and introduces the artists and works that this book will be about. It also uses debates about readership – among authors like F. R. Leavis and Virginia Woolf – and changes in publishing practices—in book clubs, larger print runs, and wood-engraved illustrations – to set the stage for the ways in which the legacy of the nineteenth-century novel was crafted for and by twentieth-century readers.

In Chapter 4 explores Joan Hassall’s (1906–88) illustrations for The Folio Society’s editions of Jane Austen’s novels and stories. Completed between 1957 and 1963, and then added to in 1975, these editions tend to be criticized for blending too seamlessly into Austen’s novels. Hassall, whose style was anachronistic in the 1950s through the 1970s but fittingly like that of Austen’s time, can seem (and has been described as) apolitical, unassertive, and small, descriptors that were once negatively applied to Austen. Hassall took a craft-based ownership of the Austen canon, finding the author in even the smallest of notches and grooves of her engravings. She collected, for example, scraps of ribbons and fabrics from the Georgian era, which she then copied and traced onto her woodblocks and patterned onto the covers, frontispieces, and chapter headings of her Austen editions. Hassall is less reinventing the nineteenth-century novel than retracing and reinhabiting it. Yet she, like the other artists in this book, invested an enormous amount in her readings of the novels, not just in the details of her images, but in the labor of engraving itself, which she did despite nearly crippling arthritic pain.

The sense of the Scriptural sentence – its meaning – in Dante’s vision is put into play and on display through sensations both visual and audible. Dante’s description insists on this, with its persistent pairing in a sustained parallelism of impressions in each of these sensory modalities. Dante pursues this transformation of sense – or meaning – into a supersensory type of sensation and presence by the alchemy of poetic language further in the subsequent cantos, XIX and XX, comprised within the heaven of Jove that flesh out the intellectual meaning of the vision presented in XVIII. 70–117 by elaborating on its phenomenal form. Dante employs in particular techniques of synaesthesia or the blending of senses. The individual senses exceed their own proper limits and open perspectives bleeding into other realms of other senses. Considered as writing, this sensory phantasmagoria is significant, in the end, not for its perceptual qualities so much as for that which they index by virtue of the differences out of which signification is engendered. This phenomenon of synaesthesia raises the question of perceiving things whole, or at least multi-perspectivally. Geometry similarly furnishes metaphors for perspectives on what is humanly inconceivable. The universalism of Dante’s vision of world justice is based on self-critical perspectives placing into question his own inevitably limited and Eurocentric point of view. The divine vision is opened by limitless critique of all our own human perspectives.