A Humument
A Treated Victorian Novel
WW Norton · Print & ebook · January 10, 2017
“One of the most winning and witty artistic experiments of recent time." –Washington Post In 1966, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W.
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- Who it’s for
- A Victorian novel becomes a playful visual experiment in all the stories its words might conceal.
- Themes
- Visual-text experimentation, Love and loss
- Genres
- Absurdist Fiction
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Start with this bookAbout this book
“One of the most winning and witty artistic experiments of recent time." –Washington Post In 1966, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document, and began working over the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, "I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words.
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As I worked on it, I replaced the text I’d stripped away with visual images of all kinds. It began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams, and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties." After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This sixth and final edition, published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Tom Phillips' first experiments with A Human Document, is the first entirely revised and complete version of A Humument, which brought to a close half a century’s artistic endeavor.
Words Made Strange
A Victorian novel becomes a playful visual experiment in all the stories its words might conceal.
Come here for
- Text mined for hidden stories, poems, dreams, and surrealist turns
- A meeting of literary invention and visual art
Expect
- A treated text, with images replacing what has been stripped away
- A final, fully revised edition closing a half-century of work
Where it sits
| Absurdist Fiction | 53% |
|---|
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- European Art
- Essay Collections
- Authors
- Tom Phillips
- Publisher
- WW Norton
- Published
- January 10, 2017
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Visual-text experimentation · Love and loss
- Reading lane
- European Art