Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing

“Janzen Kooistra makes a superb contribution to the literature on the history of the book…. This volume itself is a beautiful artifact, generously illustrated with examples of gift-book engravings, often displaying the entire printed page in order to display the interplay between text and illustration. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” * Choice *
“Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing is an important book that identifies a fertile area for future study. Kooistra provides consistently acute analysis on the commodification of poetry, the impact that this had on author-publisher relationships, and the interaction between material and literary culture. This is a mature piece of scholarship that shows a profound grasp of the subject and the related methodological and theoretical implications.” * Tennyson Research Bulletin *
“A model of lucid analysis and a valuable addition to the understanding of nineteenth-century book production and consumer culture.” * Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 *
“Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing is the third and perhaps the best in a series of monographs in which Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has explored the ways in which the material forms of Victorian illustrated books produced meanings and audiences…. Her new book amounts to nothing less than a critical inquiry into the place of poetry in the modern world.” * Victorian Studies *
“Kooistra persuasively argues that in the 1860s, the illustrated book of poetry became one of the most important literary commodities of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. With great clarity and depth, she articulates the central relevance of ornamental, illustrated poetic gift books to literary culture, British identity, and the place of poetry in histories of authorship, reading, and publishing…. There is nothing stale about her contribution to book history studies.” * Review 19 *
“[A]n important contribution to Victorian studies, as well as to the fields of visual and material culture, popular literacy, and book history … confirming [Lorraine Janzen Kooistra] as the leading authority on Victorian illustrated books of poetry.” * The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies *
“Janzen Kooistra writes with formidable insight into the vast, intermingled range of…influences—artists, engravers, businessmen, and consumers—upon 1860s gift-book production…. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing does much to recapture the dual importance of the gift book as commercial and cultural object.” * Victorian Periodicals Review *
“Thoroughly researched and lucidly argued, Kooistra’s study makes a convincing case for the centrality of the gift book to understanding Victorian poetry, illustration, book production, and consumer culture.” * author of Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle *
“Over five lavishly illustrated chapters…Kooistra presents case studies of individual texts, including many examples from Tennyson, and illuminates different phases of production, from commissioning and marketing to illustrating and to facsimile engraving.” * Victorian Poetry *