Abstract

Cultures produce and exchange meanings, asking questions about the nature of individual and communal lives. Views are articulated in multifarious ways, always opened to interpretation and challenge. Among the many possible vehicles for personal, national or global expressions and conversations around cultural matters, be they philosophical, social, political or historical, the arts have always held a pivotal position. Words and images have played complementary roles in the representation – and therefore in our perception – of the world. (Re)Writing Without Borders: Contemporary Intermedial Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts gathers twelve essays dealing with different aspects pertaining to the relationship between word and image. The breadth of expertise (whether in film studies, adaptation studies, art studies, media studies or comparative literary studies) from an international array of authors (Brazil, Great-Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Slovenia) offers a collective examination of diverse critical approaches that explore how different topics (adaptation and ideology, politics and national cinemas, modernization of traditional genres such as the western, relations between art and digital graphics, ekphrastic narratives, etc.) are expressed through different types of texts and media. Cross-artistic encounters are analyzed in this volume with a view to better capture the most up-to-date interaction between literature and the visual arts. What this new interface adds to existing studies of collaboration between the written and the visual, the kind of narratives that are born of such mergers, and how they represent and articulate today’s reality are all examined here. Media of word and image proliferate and the borders between them are porous. The diverse range of approaches and of study texts in the volume celebrates this proliferation and porosity, and attests to the continuing and wide-ranging relevance of literature and the visual arts in producing and reproducing meaning within contemporary contexts.