Programma

Sir Philip Sidney famously elaborated a notion of poetry as “an art of imitation […] that is to say a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end ─ to teach and delight” (An Apology for Poesy, 1595). The interplay between text and image in early modern literature, language and culture intersects crucial issues related to post-reformation politics and agendas; like texts and theatrical performances, images are “ideologically charged” and debated (Elam 2017). The Twelfth Iasems conference will focus on literary and dramatic uses of the visual, looking at how images, portraits, objects, props and similar ‘artefacts’ generate alternative ways of speaking, telling and seeing that confirm and/or re-signify literary norms, linguistic codes, moral values, and aesthetic standards. The conference aims at exploring speaking and spoken pictures, imaginative and material processes of ‘figuring forth’, semiotics of display, theoretical and performative modes of the visual, contexts of representation, circuits of signification, in order to reach a better understanding of the ways in which the visual is produced and mediated in early modern literature and culture.