Erika Wicky: La portraitomanie: Intermediality and the Portrait in 19th-Century France

From painting, photography, caricature, and sculpture to novels, essays, literary criticism, and historical writing, nineteenth-century France has aptly been described as the “siècle des portraits” (Dufour, 1997). This issue examines the nineteenth-century portrait with an emphasis on transmediality (how the portrait genre traveled from one medium to another), as well as on intermediality (whereby portraits originating in different media were brought together in the same works). Contributors explore the portrait as part of a wider evolution of textual and visual media as well as cultural history in France, while also revealing the extent to which intermediality is (re)invented in the nineteenth century.