James Heffernan's Cultivating Picturacy is a treasure for scholars and students interested in the history, theory, and practice of text-image relations. The volume, beautifully produced and illustrated by Baylor University Press, contains a breadth of reference, richness of analysis, and limpid prose that are truly marvelous. It consists of fourteen essays (including the introduction), almost all published in the period 1988-2000, which, taken together, crown a distinguished career in what used to be rather quaintly called 'sister arts' criticism, but which is now, in the age of metastasizing visual-verbal media, among the most urgent topics of cultural history and aesthetics.
-- Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
For two decades, James Heffernan has covered the intermedial field precisely by letting his favored topics flow smoothly into associated questions generated from them, one issue dovetailing transparently into another due to the engrossing, subtle clarity of the critic’s prose. Having wondered at the start about 'why we have no word to denote the visual counterpart of literacy, no word that designates the capacity to interpret pictures' (1)--the ability or 'capacity,' that is, but also the grain of attention involved--literary scholar Heffernan not only gives us such a term but offers an extended case in point for its flexible understanding, telling application, and real aesthetic yield. Entitled by neologism, the book brings news in every chapter.
-- European Romantic Review
