The Pictorial Paradigm of La Vallée: A Text-Image Reading of the Incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho

Abstract

In this article, Alice Labourg is dedicated to the question of pictoriality in the incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Close formal analysis enables to understand how the pictorial impression many readers have felt is created through language and its generation of a powerful iconotextual landscape. Painting is embedded in the very fabric of the text through a pictorial writing which operates on two complementary modes, first on an iconic and figurative level which presents the reader with various picture-like scenes, then on a more diffused, semiotic dimension which translates painting as a plastic signifier within the linguistic materiality.