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Text and Image in the City: Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture in Urban Space, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017; xv, 172 pp., ISBN (10) 1-4438-4388-1, ISBN (13) 978-1-4438-4388-1
Text and Image in the City: Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture in Urban Space is a stimulating work of cultural history, fed by many disciplines. Its aim is to uncover the ways in which the city is textualized, both through the letters and images written on its surfaces and those that are produced within it. This book may be short (at seven chapters plus an introduction and closing 'Note'), but it is rich in archival research and generously illustrated. Truly multidisciplinary, this study blends art history, graphic communication, literary scholarship, book history, typography, and urban history.
It emerges at a moment when the concurrent critical interest in materiality and the spatial turn have gravitated towards each other, and the results offer provocative insights.
Sarah Kirby writes in her closing 'Note' that there is a 'renewed debate about living in cities: how our environment contributes to our lives, the ways we move around a city, the values we place on our heritage [...] what is worth preserving for whom and why' (p.162). Her comment highlights the timeliness of this collection. The Slow Cities movement is one way that groups are seeking to reshape and better understand the increasingly swift, large, and potentially bewildering metropolis. Another route to that enquiry is this book's reading of the city as a cultural construct actively produced by text, and which in turn provokes the reactions and creativity of its beholders. The volume as a whole, though, resists the temptation to position the city as a symbol of imaginary wholeness sacrificed to a rapacious modernity. Instead, the city emerges as a space in which text and image do supplement faceto-face interaction but also have the capacity 'to reflect, to stimulate and to reinforce new connections and interactions' (p. xii). The work of textualizing the city, as John Hinks describes it in his introduction, is an 'exploration of the long-standing, but continually evolving, symbiotic relationship between text, image, urban life and landscape' (p. ix).
The crucial point for this study is the reciprocity between text and environment: texts...