Introduction: To fasten words again to visible things: The American imagetext

Welcome to this special issue of the European Journal of American Culture, dedicated to the subject of the ‘American imagetext’. The essays that follow arise from a conference that we organized at the University of East Anglia in 2011, where we sought to provide an open and receptive arena for the investigation of American cultural products and ideas occurring at the intersection of word and image. Both of us scholars in American literature and visual culture, and both feeling keenly the need for a stronger presence of word and image research in American Studies, we sought to create a forum in which like-minded researchers might come together in an event of creative and intellectual exchange. We were delighted – and a little surprised – when our call for papers received over 90 enthusiastic responses. We were also delighted to be able to host keynote addresses from three of the most established and eminent theorists in that field: W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago), Miles Orvell (Temple University) and Mick Gidley (Leeds University), and were very grateful to delegates travelling from eleven countries and four continents. The conference invited speakers to consider the product and practice of the interrelations of image and word in the widest sense, encouraging, as we wrote in the call for papers, ‘a theoretical approach that considers, for example, any aspect of science, historiography, theology, iconology, art history, multicultural and transnational study, film and media studies, poetry scholarship, and cognitive psychology’. Scholars from the international interdisciplinary community responded to this wide brief with energy, creativity and warm collegiality, and the gathering saw three days of presentations and conversation across the breadth of image and text studies, taking in (but not restricted to) abstract art and the manifesto, the discursive contexts for design and architecture, photographic mediation and photo books, artists’ books and notebooks, illustrated novels and graphic literature, posters and textual art, concrete poetry and ekphrasis..