SOURCE: Hubert, Renée Riese. “The Illustrated Book: Text and Image.” In Intertexuality: New Perspectives in Criticism, edited by Jeanine Parisier Plottel and Hanna Charney, pp. 177-95. New York: New York Literary Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Hubert uses a study of Alice in Wonderland to discuss the challenges inherent in the analysis of an illustrated text. Hubert compares the illustrations of Carroll, Tenniel, and Salvador Dali, who published an illustrated Alice in 1969, to demonstrate the differing relationships between word and image in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts.

A study of the illustrated book requires an examination of why visual interpretation cannot exclusively be studied as a series of images subservient to a text. Alice in Wonderland is a useful choice for showing the methodological problems that arise in a study of the illustrated book.

The drawings in the original version of Alice in Wonderland (entitled Alice's Adventures Under...