Addresses a genuine gap in word and image studies. It offers fresh conceptual frameworks in which to think about the relationship between visual and verbal practices, with American works and artefacts positioned within the context of the American philosophical tradition. -- .

Mixed messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and contextual terms. Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of Dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context. With a foreword by Professor Miles Orvell of Temple University, Gander and Garland's collection assembles cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in American literature and the visual arts, including Lauren Weingarden and Caroline Blinder.