Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration

Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honorae de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French JulyMonarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on theinfluential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, 'les franecais peints par eux-maemes'. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scaenes de la vie privaee et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scaenes de la vie privaee. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production.

Keri Yousif is Associate Professor of French at Indiana State University, USA.