"Words and images interact with each other in art and everyday life, and do so in various ways. Building on recent currents of thinking in visual semiotics and the philosophy of language, a vibrant interdisciplinary field of inquiry called "word-and-image studies" has developed over the past few decades. Much of this new scholarship, however, has originated in the French-speaking world and thus has not been available in English-until now." "Words and Images: A French Rendez-vous features six new essays translated from the French by editor Anthony Wall, These explorations spin an adventurous web through time-from the very beginnings of human symbolic systems on prehistoric cave walls to the textual background of early modern and Enlightenment art, from the coexistence of a poem and a coloured drawing visible on an exterior wall in contemporary Paris to an interdisciplinary space that includes archaeology, anthropology, art history, literary and communications theory, and the philosophy of mind." "The volume concludes with a bibliographical essay that provides an extensive summary of the most recent critical studies undertaken in France, Belgium, and French-speaking Canada."--BOOK JACKET.