viz.

Image Credit: The Independent

While Caroline Bingley enumerates the accomplishments of elegant females in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy makes one significant addition: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” This pivotal scene, in which Darcy hints at the attraction to Elizabeth Bennet that blindsides her later, may charm audiences in part because Jane Austen, like her readers, cares about the written word. Austen parodied the sentimental and the gothic novels respectively in Love and Freindship and Northanger Abbey, defended the novel as a genre in Northanger Abbey, and showed her characters equally interested in reading. Fanny Price rhapsodizes as she joins a circulating library and becomes “a chooser of books” in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot discusses poetry and prose with Captain Benwick in Persuasion, and Sanditon’s proto-villain Sir Edward Denham fancies himself “quite in the line of the Lovelaces.” Yet reading practices today are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone as they were when Pride and Prejudice was first published on 28 January 1813.

Image credit: Wikipedia

I'll test my art history chops today (no promises) as I explore the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), late Renaissance Mannerist and an artist of interest to everyone from the critic Barthes to the stadium rock band Kansas to the surrealist Salvador Dali. 

The designer(s) of this year’s TILTS symposium flier chose an engraving after Arcimboldo’s The Librarian (1566).  In investigating some context for the painting, I couldn’t help but notice the aptness of the image—not only, of course, because of TILTS’ ever-present commitment to textual studies, but because of the particular place Arcimboldo holds in literary and popular imagination in the Post-Renaissance world.