Offering a major contribution to the field of American culture and aesthetics in an interdisciplinary frame, this collection assembles the cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in literature and the visual arts, with a foreword by Miles Orvell. The volume represents the first of its kind: an intervention in current interdisciplinary approaches to the intersections of the written word and the visual image that moves beyond standard theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and experiential terms. Tracing a strong lineage of pragmatism, romanticism, surrealism and dada in American intermedial works through the nineteenth century to the present day, the editors and authors of this volume chart a new and vital methodology for the study and appreciation of the correspondences between visual and verbal practices.

Reviews

'Mixed Messages offers a set of case studies which reappraise old American masters (the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams) to provoke new, enterprising understandings of artworks that press into service textual and visual features.'
Matthew Holman, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 40, Issue 2

Foreword - Miles Orvell
Introduction: to fasten words again to visible - and invisible - things - Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland
1. A poetics of organic expression: Louis Sullivan's transcendentalist legacy in word and image - Lauren S. Weingarden
2. Photographic studies in the Hawthornes' American Note-books - Jessie Morgan-Owens
3. Fragments of the future: Walker Evans's polaroids - Caroline Blinder
4. Cartooning the marvelous: word and image in Chicago Surrealism - Joanna Pawlik
5. 'Twenty-six things at once': pragmatic perspectives on Frank O'Hara and Norman Bluhm's Poem-Paintings - Catherine Gander
6. 'Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture': Arakawa and Madeline Gins's Mechanism of Meaning - Sarah Garland
7. 'Then art will change. This is the future': Nancy Spero's manifestary practice - Rachel Warriner
8. Forms of potential: reading Lawrence Weiner - Katie L. Price
9. Testimony by hand: Ann Hamilton's myein - Julie Brown
10. Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction: the altered books of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube - Katy Masuga
11. The idea, the machine and the art: word and image in the twenty-first century. Envoi - Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland
Index

Editors

Catherine Gander is Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at Queen's University Belfast

Sarah Garland is Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of East Anglia