SOURCE: Kennedy, Victor R. “Pictures as Metaphors in Thackeray's Illustrated Novels.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 9, no. 2 (1994): 135-47.

In the following essay, Kennedy argues that Thackeray's illustrations are often essential to a full understanding of his novels. The allusions and visual puns of Thackeray's drawings contribute further meaning to the narrative, Kennedy finds, and in some cases provide an ironic commentary on the text by their dissonance with the scenes to which they correspond.

Literary criticism has traditionally been concerned with verbal metaphors. I consider a less traditional medium for metaphor: visual images in the illustrations accompanying a literary text.

There is a certain irony in discussing visual metaphor in illustrated novels; historically, metaphor in literature most often has been based on a verbal description of an image with a visual referent (Richards, 1936). The power of a metaphor such as John Donne's compass trope for lovers, for example, comes...