Ranging widely without sacrificing what is an exhaustive analysis of single images, the book wears its encyclopedic knowledge lightly.... What distinguishes James Thomson's The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation,1730-1842 and what will win it a broad audience is Jung's salutary commitment to reconnecting book-historical inquiries to art-critical discussions of illustration or iconotext... This focus on both the ... Read moretechnological and cultural contexts for book illustration will attract a broad, interdisciplinary audience... Fusing book history with art criticism toinvestigate the intersections of technology, marketing, and eighteenth-century poetic reception, Jung's study promises to reshape the field of book illustration studies.
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews
More than 100 reproductions, many from the author's own collection, make this book impressive as a labor of love as well as of scholarship.... Jung has made a significant contribution to Thomson scholarship and the history of eighteenth century book illustration.
New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
Sandro Jung's study of The Seasons is a fresh and stimulating history of the publishing and marketing of one of the most popular texts of the eighteenth century. But it is also far more than that. This book radically extends our understanding of the cultural and economic value of Thomson's poem by investigating its visual readings and its complex cultural afterlife within and far beyond Britain as the poem's imagery morphed across an astonishing range of visual arts, including engravings in books, prints, cartoons, ceramics, furniture, and music. The result is a persuasive demonstration of the intersections between technology, aesthetics, commerce, market, and reception.
James Raven, University of Essex and Magdalene College, University of Cambridge Here is the writing of a fresh new chapter in the scholarship of The Seasons. Consideration of print, paratexts, pictures, price, and pocket diaries all make for the richest contextualisation yet of the production and consumption of James Thomson's poetic masterpiece from its first appearance to the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow Show Less