Abstract Illustration may be thought of as a picture relating to the text in a containing medium, such as a book. Here, however, the objective is to reconsider some of the conceptual conventions surrounding the pictorial genre, by way of using illustrations as productive of their own metalanguage or of a language that refers to illustration as a media phenomenon. Illustrations taken from the Swedish nineteenth-century magazine Ny Illustrerad Tidning are inserted into a framework of historiographic texts on the genre of illustration, by nineteenth-century writers such as Henry Blackburn and P. G. Hamerton, and present concepts about media and media interrelations, most notably W. J. T. Mitchell’s ‘imagetext’. Rather than test the illustrations’ capability of accommodating the juxtaposed texts and concepts, the study makes a case for their ability to counteract—negotiate, complicate, adjust, sidestep, or discard—the terms initially on offer. From a close analysis of the illustrations’ media properties, in relation to the conceptual material, the study solicits from the illustrations a metalanguage that defers the conventional separation of image and text, and displaces the idea of an original preceding the medium of reproduction. In conclusion, the study argues for two aspects that give cause to reconsider some conventional assumptions about the genre of illustration and move beyond the concept of ‘imagetext’: counteraction as providing a methodological strategy for knowledge production beyond the confines of the containing medium; and the mediality of illustration as a three-part relation between the image–text–media of reproduction rather than the two-part relation of the image–text.

中文翻译：

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反作用插图及其元语言

摘要插图可以被认为是与诸如书之类的包含媒体中的文本有关的图片。但是，这里的目的是通过使用插图来产生他们自己的元语言或将插图称为媒介现象的语言，来重新考虑围绕绘画体裁的一些概念约定。源自19世纪瑞典杂志Ny Illustrerad Tidning的插图，被插图类型的史学文本插入框架中，由19世纪的作家，例如Henry Blackburn和PG Hamerton，提出了有关媒体和媒体相互关系的概念，其中最引人注目的是WJT Mitchell的“图像文字”。与其测试插图容纳并列文本和概念的能力，该研究为他们抵消（谈判，复杂化，调整，回避或放弃）最初提供的条件提供了依据。通过对插图的媒体属性以及概念性材料的仔细分析，本研究从插图中寻求了一种元语言，它阻止了图像和文本的常规分离，并取代了复制媒体之前的原始思想。总而言之，研究提出了两个方面的原因，这两个方面使我们有理由重新考虑一些关于插图类型的常规假设，并超越了“图像文本”的概念：反作用是​​为知识生产提供了一种方法论策略，超越了包含媒体的范围；