Abstract:
This talk will look at literary illustration as intersemiotic translation, as the “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Roman Jakobson). Using as examples illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, it will ask, amongst other things, how beyond representing scenes and characters, illustrators have “translated” into their own sign system literary elements which have no immediate visual equivalent, such as the verbal nonsense games that characterise Carroll’s novel.
About the Speaker:
Emer O’Sullivan, Professor of English Literature at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, has published widely in German and English on image studies, children’s literature and translation. Kinderliterarische Komparatistik (Winter 2000) won the IRSCL Award for outstanding research in 2001, and Comparative Children’s Literature (Routledge 2005) the Children’s Literature Association 2007 Book Award. Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature (co-edited with Andrea Immel) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. She is currently working on an updated and revised edition of Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2010).