Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History

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Ohio University Press, 2002 - Design - 332 pages

Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central.

Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti's illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author's lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's reading of Rossetti's illustrated works reveals for the first time the visual-verbal aesthetic that was fundamental to Rossetti's poetics. Her exhaustive archival research brings to light new information on how Rossetti's commitment to illustration and attitudes to copyright and control influenced her transactions with publishers and the books they produced. Janzen Kooistra also tracks the poet's reception in the twentieth century through a complex web of illustrated books produced for a wide range of audiences.

Analyzing an impressive array of empirical data, Janzen Kooistra shows how Rossetti's packaging for commodity consumption--by religious presses, publishers of academic editions and children's picture books, and makers of erotica and collectibles--influenced the reception of her work and her place in literary history.

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Contents

Christina Rossettis Visual Imagination བཋ ཛ
56
Books for Children
91
Devotional Books
141
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is professor emerita of English and founding codirector emerita of Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Digital Humanities. She is the author of The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books and Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. She is co-editor of The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts and The Yellow Nineties Online.

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