Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture - Review

Aug 23, 2026

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A review of Patricia Mainardi’s Another World, focusing on how nineteenth-century popular image-making practices evolved through cross-border exchange and technological change. It highlights the book’s richly illustrated scope, its emphasis on the hand-drawn image, and the role of media technologies in shaping artistic expression. Special attention is given to transnational circulation of prints, copyright regimes, and the development of comic-strip invention via word-image hybrids and lithography’s rise in modern life depiction.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time6 min

AccessFree to download

Review Overview

Transnational Image-Making and Print Circulation

Focus on Töpffer and Comic-Strip Context

Structure of the Book’s Chapters

Chapter One: Lithography

Patricia Mainardi, Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture Review by Maaheen Ahmed Patricia Mainardi Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017 ISBN: 9780300215618 (hardcover), 304 p., 166 color and 46 b/w illustrations. Named after J. J. Grandville’s playfully imaginative illustrated book Un autre monde (1844), art historian Patricia Mainardi’s Another World deftly weaves together a history of the different, interacting practices of popular image-making in the nineteenth century. While the focus is on France and England, the book’s discussion and corpus inevitably transcends borders, reflecting the speed and ease with which images traveled and were appropriated; copyright was only established in the wake of the 1886 Berne Convention and prints, in contrast to art works, were more ubiquitous and easy to transport. Grandville, himself “an international favorite”(236), personifies the transnational persistence and cross-fertilization of print media that is a primary concern of Mainardi’s book. This richly illustrated book is complemented by a lucid writing style, making it a pleasure to read not only for academics but also for other readers interested in an aesthetic, historical and media-technological perspective on the rise and establishment of print culture in the nineteenth century, its gradual ‘popularization’and its experimentation with word-image hybridity. With its refreshingly vast collection of images, it is a visual treat and a testament to the vibrant visual culture accompanying the early days of industrialization and the modern world. To date, there exist only a handful of studies on comics and other illustrated media before the late nineteenth century, starting with David Kunzle’s seminal, but still out of print, two-volume History of the Comic Strip (1973). Other highlights include Kunzle’s and Thierry Groensteen’s respective monographs on Töpffer (Father of the Comic Strip [2007] and M. Töpffer invente la bande dessinée [2014]), Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick’s Forging a New Medium (1999), Philippe Kaenel’s Le Métier d’illustrateur (2005), Thierry Smolderen’s Les Naissances de la bande dessinée (2009), Lawrence Grove’s Comics in French (2010) and Camille Filliot’s impressively thorough PhD dissertation from 2011, La Bande dessinée au siècle de Rodolphe Töpffer1. As suggested by most of these titles, Töpffer is a recurrent figure, and sometimes the star of these works. Mainardi’s book, which also devotes several pages to Töpffer’s littérature en estampes is similarly motivated by the aim of providing a context to the invention of the comic strip that is grounded “in the symbiosis between technological innovation and advances in artistic expression”(2) . She consequently constructs “an alternative history, one that foregrounds the hand-drawn image” instead of tracing “tracing the trajectory of printed imagery as culminating in the photograph”(235). While this history is convincingly and 1 Currently available online at Töpferrania: [http://www.topfferiana.fr/2016/10/la-bande-dessinee-au-siecle-de-rodolphe-topffer/](http://www.topfferiana.fr/2016/10/la-bande-dessinee-au-siecle-de-rodolphe-topffer/)[ ](http://www.topfferiana.fr/2016/10/la-bande-dessinee-au-siecle-de-rodolphe-topffer/)[IMAGE](IMAGE) [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 19, No.1 (2018) 92 thoroughly narrated, more engagement with, and acknowledgment of, the works mentioned above would have greatly enriched the book. The book’s five chapters consider different, but often interacting and overlapping kinds of print media in the light of “the globalization of visual media”(3), their inclination towards representing the quotidian, thus rejecting the higher arts’ obsessions with history and reflecting a shift in market forces and audiences, as well as the many kinds of word-image relationships ranging “from the wordplay of caricature and the brilliance of Grandville’s punnin

FAQs

What is the main focus of Mainardi’s Another World as described in the review?

The review emphasizes a history of nineteenth-century popular image-making practices and how prints circulated, interacted, and were appropriated across borders, shaped by evolving technologies and artistic expression.

How does the book treat the relationship between words and images?

It explores multiple word-image relationships, from caricature wordplay and punning imagery to later-century book illustration and novella-like printed comics that blend textual and visual meaning.

Why is lithography central in the discussion of print culture?

Lithography is presented as a key triggering development, enabling affordable and accurate reproductions and rapidly supporting images of modern life, especially through street and shop-window display culture.

Aug 23, 2026

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