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Book Reviews 191 Ralph F. Bogardus. Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A. L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984. 249 pp. $42.95. Bogardus explores the New York Edition of James's oeuvre in terms of the relationship between the texts and Coburn's photographic frontispieces for the individual volumes. While James maintained directoral control throughout the collaboration, Cobum enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, especiaUy witii respect to those photographs taken in Italy. Indeed, Coburn's work direcdy influenced the coherence of the oeuvre: "The frontispieces were beginning to help determine the order in which certain of die shorter works were to appear in the edition" (15). In "Part One: The CoUaboration," Bogardus sketches a general history of this collaboration, including reproductions of die twenty-four frontispieces themselves. Over and against the art of ülustration, James chose the photograph in order to exercise his own control of the image. "Cobum did not have the sketcher's option. He was much less likely to interpose his own interpretation on the scene in a way that would interfere with the author's directions . . . and the picture-making mechanism, the viewfinder, can be shared—as a sketcher's hand cannot be—with another's eyes" (18). Rather tiian compete with the text, the images were to be "optical symbols" (18) representing a type or an idea, and yet they "work equaUy well as images viewed separately from their texts" (24). In such a way, "The Prefaces, the revised texts, and, finaUy, the beautiful frontispieces merge to achieve a weU conceived whole" (22). "Part Two: The Picture-Book Age" sets out a brief history of the art of ülustration, and picture-text relations in general, as a background against which Bogardus examines James's attitudes toward pictorial representation in literature. James "openly expressed dislike at having his own work illustrated, and though his serialized work was often accompanied by pictures, the art of 'black and white' was kept out of nearly all his fiction when it appeared in book form" (51). The iUustration of nonaction, on the other hand, "appears to have caused James no difficulty" (83). Throughout his life, many of James's own nonaction works were illustrated. James appreciated the art of iUustration itself, as his own book Picture and Text (1893) attests, though "couched amidst his plaudits were many criticisms of iUustration" (51). During the peak of its popularity in the 1890s, the style of illustration underwent a radical shift from caricature to realistic representation: James's "youthful enthusiasm was replaced by a strong skepticism regarding the ülustration of literature. ... He considered ülustration an affront to the written word" (56, 70). That is, "in any picture-text combination either the sketcher's or the writer's picture wiU inherently dominate, and as far as James was concerned, tiie proper practice of ülustration called for the picture to be subordinate to die word" (66). Not until he entered into collaboration with Cobum "would Henry James welcome the iUustration of his own prose and participate in its creation.... Before he could do tiiat, however, James not only had to overcome his deep seated aversion to being Ulustrated; he also had to overcome an aversion to the medium used to ulustrate the New York Edition—photography" (83). "Part Three: The Photographic Age" examines James's art within the context of the daguerreotype, tiiat medium's subsequent history and development, and tiie various ways in which it came to structure the opposition between romanticism and realism. As halftone photographs replaced hand iUustration, they also came to be used more commonly in literary works. Toward die end of die nineteenth century, adverse reactions to the use of photographs for illustrating fiterature became more and more widespread: "Photography and die new photomechanical technique contained a real economic threat: it replaced many of the hand artists and the engravers. ... It also threatened writers by demanding tiiat they supply suitable texts for the picture press or cease to place their writings witii publishers. . . . Machines were replacing individuals, the real was replacing the ideal, mass-produced art was replacing the unique Art object" (110). With the exception of 192 The...

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