SOURCE: Wagner, Peter. “‘Official Discourse’ in Hogarth's Prints.” In Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution, pp. 101-37. London: Reaktion Books, 1995.

In the following essay, Wagner discusses Hogarth's work within the context of various contemporary discourses, maintaining that the artist's participation in such discourses was not necessarily something he could completely control.

It is even probable that there exists one single rhetorical form shared by the dream, literature, and the image.

Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l'image’

Let us go back to the fundamentals of image-making and this time examine it from the other side—from the viewer's gaze. … And from the inside—the social formation is inherently and immanently present in the image and not a fate or an external which clamps down on an image …

Bryson, ‘Semiology and Visual Interpretation’, in Visual Theory

What does it matter if I have added thoughts to the work of...