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P atricia M ainardi . Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture .

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/rhy268

1937-5239

Christine Haynes,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

In this gorgeously illustrated tour of visual print culture in nineteenth-century France, Patricia Mainardi immerses us in Another World. Her title comes from a visionary graphic novel by J. J. Grandville published in 1844, Another World: Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions, Explorations, Peregrinations, Excursions, Vacations, Cosmogonies, Phatasmagorias, Reveries, Gaiety, Jokes, Whimsies, Metamorphoses, Zoomorphoses, Lithomorphoses, Metempsychoses, Apotheoses, and Other Things. Composed of a series of images, each organized around a fantastic idea and “illustrated” by text, Grandville’s book mixes fantasy and satire in a kind of free association that foreshadows experimental poems and novels of the twentieth century. Challenging the very idea of narrative, Another World ends with a rebus cautioning the reader against trying to decipher its images too closely: depicting a man butting his head against stone, the rebus is accompanied by a caption warning, “Ah, Believe Me, Dear Reader, Do Not Behave Like This!” (190). This rebus would make a fitting epigraph for Mainardi’s book. To enter Another World of nineteenth-century illustrated print, the reader must refrain from analyzing its images too literally—or anachronistically, from the perspective of twenty-first-century media—and instead appreciate them on their own terms, as windows onto what was then a revolutionary new visual culture. As Mainardi reminds us, the volume of illustrated prints produced in the nineteenth century exceeded that of all previous centuries combined. Enabled by advances in reproductive technology as well as in popular literacy, the new graphic language was international. However, many of its artists and publishers worked in France, which hence constitutes the focus of Mainardi’s study.