Narrative Images

Image coming soon

Extent: 165 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: Philosophy

Language: English

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(January 2027)

ISBN: 9783957433718

6.1 x 9.25 inches

Price: $52.00

Can single pictures be narrative? Can they tell stories, purely by visual means and without words?
This book offers an extended argument that they can. This goes against the dominant view that either words or several pictures are needed. But if this is so, what makes them narrative? The first part of the book identifies necessary and paradigmatic characteristics, like events or a time sequence. The second part asks how it is possible that a still picture can represent something temporally extended at all, and argues that we can make sense of this via semantic rules. It then develops several such candidate rules and tests them with examples from different picture traditions, from medieval art to contemporary illustrations and much in between. Finally, the book turns to cases where the narrative content is not semantically but pragmatically generated through circumstantial meaning and background knowledge, as with protest pictures.