“[T]o Mix Colours for Painters” and Illustrate and Adapt Gulliver’s Travels Worldwide: Street Murals, Adaptability and Transmediality

Abstract

This chapter probes the interface between illustration and adaptation via literary murals with a view to assessing the transmediality of both the illustrative and adaptive processes which such murals imply. It does so by providing a case study focusing on the Gulliverian murals in Dublin, Zagreb, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Altogether, these murals testify to the extensive and lasting reach of Swift’s literary classic, as well as to its capacity to elicit multifarious responses. Individually, they constitute samples of artistic creation whose aesthetic dimension is very often accompanied by a social and/or political agenda which naturally varies from place to place and from artist to artist. Literature-inspired street murals are indeed pieces of public art which express individual as well as collective responses to literary texts, whose creation usually implies commissions by city councils and work by the community, and which spark varied public reactions—not so much to the source texts they illustrate, but rather to these texts’ interpretations by street artists and the messages these artists try to convey through their murals in specific places and times. They are therefore illustrations/adaptations with a political scheme and a social impact, and re-appropriations of literary texts, characters, or motifs which are time-, place- and community-based rather than purely aesthetically minded and totally literature-dependent.

Swift (168)