Baudelaire’s Prodigal Constantin: Guys, Illustration and the Urban ‘Spirituel’
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19395807
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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- Title of journal
- Word and Image Interactions
- Article number
- -
- First page
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- Volume
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- Issue
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- ISSN
- 1388-3569
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2021
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 6000-word article is developed from a peer-review conference paper presented at the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS-IERTI), the leading world society for Word and Image Studies, at the triennial conference, Université de Lausanne in July 2017. It was submitted by open peer-review competitive call in December 2017. It was subsequently accepted for publication as one of twenty selected from ninety submissions included in the peer-review edited publication, 'Reproductions', edited by Philippe Kaenel, Kirsty Bell, et al. (publication date: Spring 2021; COVID-related delay from Summer 2020). The article re-examines theories of modern illustration in the light of new approaches to visual and philosophical understanding of 'reproduction' as a mode pivotal to how we see, consume and engage with visual cultural innovation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In particular, it interrogates Baudelaire’s critical portrait of the illustrator Constantin Guys, in his 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' (1863), to shed light on its underexplored relationships with Romantic visual art and Baudelaire’s parallel concerns with an uncanny, shadow modernity. The article thus engages fresh questions and cultural meanings about the 'ephemeral' and 'reproduction' in the emergence of what Philippe Hamon calls an 'ocular modernity' to develop a vision of art, both urban and synthetic. In turn, this perspective challenges Walter Benjamin's concept of a utopia of the technological 'Reproduction'. It proposes that 'illustration' as a cultural mode embodies both the culturally reproducible and its alterity.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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