"Visual Culture and the 'Alice' Books" by Erin Clark Frost

Abstract

This presentation asserts that John Tenniel’s illustrations were and are integral to the Alice books and that those illustrations changed text-image relationships in history. First, we note that Tenniel’s illustrations cannot be divorced from the cultural meanings that Alice carries today. Later in this presentation, we will discuss the social importance of a practice called appropriation. The importance of Tenniel’s work to modern multimodal composing practices is apparent because of the continued appropriation of his work today in the venues of Disney movies and the world of art. Secondly, the context of Tenniel’s life changed how people read the Alice books, therefore playing into the aforementioned point about texts and images today, and also affecting the way that the Alice books went down in history. Finally, then, I suggest that the context and importance of Tenniel’s images altered the way texts with images are read, foreshadowing the Internet era and the multimodal composing possibilities that are available today.