Visual literature, visuality of literature – a review of contemporary phenomena and trends

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present a review of the most important trends that the literary text on visual values has been subject to in the last century. The starting point was the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when under the influence of avant-garde artists (Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé) there were changes in the perception of the semantic meaning of poetry, which led to a situation in which the text’s visual structure became relevant (the works of.in.: FT Marinetti, T. Czyżewski, L. Chwistek). In the period immediately after World War I and in the inter-war period of the great avant-garde, artists associated with dadaism and the Polish group “a.r” showed interest in modern typography. Another important moment in the mutual relations of text and visual arts is the 1960s and ‘concrete poetry’ (E. Gomringer, brothers de Campos and S. Dróżdż, creating so-called ‘conceptual shapes’). In the 21st century, the emanation of activities that closely connect poetry with visual arts is electronic literature, referred to as digital or HTML, and liberature (K. Bazarnik, Z. Fajfer, R. Nowakowski).