Lire/voir The Ballad of Reading Gaol d’Oscar Wilde à la lumière de l’expressionnisme

• Published in: Sillages critiques Vol. 21
• Main Author: Xavier Giudicelli
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte" 01.12.2016
• Subjects: expressionism; illustration; Oscar Wilde; text and image; The Ballad of Reading Gaol; woodcuts
• ISSN: 1272-3819

A hybrid object, an illustrated book brings together two sets of distinct signs that complement, illuminate each other and weave dialectical relationships. This article aims at studying the edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol illustrated by German expressionist artist Erich Heckel in 1907, in order to examine the effects produced by the encounter between text and image in this edition. After replacing The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the edition illustrated by Erich Heckel in the respective contexts in which they emerged, this article analyses some of the modalities of the transposition of Oscar Wilde’s poem in Erich Heckel’s woodcuts, a transposition which sheds light on the text. It eventually stresses that Heckel’s illustrations contain a hermeneutical potential and highlight the crisis of values and of meaning that affects the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.