Taylor Clement

“Visualizing Verse” establishes new terms for assessing the effects of woodcut image reproduction on literary meaning in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed books. Specifically, this project considers the recycling of illustrations in England and across continental Europe that afforded vernacular readers a transnational advantage of shared visual language. As early modern printers and illustrators traced, copied, and reprinted images, translators shifted verbal signifiers for new audiences. Each chapter examines the ways in which illustration can inflect form and genre in emblem, lyric, and epic poetry, respectively. Drawing on critical methods of literary and translation studies, book history, and illustration, this project contributes to an interdisciplinary understanding of illustrated poetry and the ways in which the production of pictures significantly affects textual reception.