I’ve started working on my capstone project this week, and I’m very excited to get further into my research to create my digital exhibit. After class today, Lorraine walked those of us who are using COVE for our projects through the creation of a gallery exhibit and it got me very excited to start working with the platform. We ran into some problems with inserting images, but thankfully Emma was able to find us a workaround to solve that problem! 

Something that I found really interesting during this weeks discussion of Laurence Housman’s The House of Joy was how Laurence’s own sexuality influenced the illustrations even when the illustrations depicted heterosexual couples. Kyle brought up a really interesting point during Alicia’s presentation on “The Story of the Herons” about how the the Prince Heron’s longing to return to his old life as a bird could be read as a gay man longing to be freed from a heterosexual relationship.

This week, I led a discussion on an illustration by Sidney Paget for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man With the Twisted Lip.” This discussion as well as the discussions led by some of my classmates enhanced my understanding of the role these illustrations played in how we understand the text. I found the role these illustration’s played in our understanding of gender in fin-de-siécle literature. It was really interesting analyzing how much agency the women were given in these illustrations.

I really enjoyed our discussion on the images in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” this week. One thing my group talked about a lot that was particularly intriguing to me was how much the illustrations’ placement influences our reading of the text. I hadn’t looked at the images before reading the poem for the first time, and because of that, the first stanzas felt like an almost Rapunzel-like romanticization of the Lady of Shalott’s isolation. It wasn’t until the third section of the poem that I really got a taste of her madness.

This week, we looked at A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, spending a considerable amount of time working with the various illustrations by John Leech. I found it really informative and helpful going over the images as a class and talking about how Leech used the images to create his own interpretation of Dickens’ words. I am definitely not well-versed in the world of art, so analyzing illustrations like we did today in order to find some deeper meaning was really difficult for me.