A Companion to Tom Phillips

The first comprehensive scholarly collection on British artist Tom Phillips, situating his interdisciplinary oeuvre within contemporary conceptual and intermedia art.

A Companion to Tom Phillips is the first critical volume devoted entirely to the British artist Tom Phillips (1937-2022) and his groundbreaking work across visual art, poetry, collage, music, translation, and performance. Bringing together international scholars from literature, art history, media studies, and poetics, the collection explores Phillips's celebrated masterpiece A Humument alongside his broader intermedial practice. The essays examine themes of erasure, collage, materiality, identity, and artistic experimentation, showing how Phillips reimagined the relationship between word and image. Central to the volume is A Humument, the extraordinary "treated novel" Phillips developed over five decades from W. H. Mallock's largely forgotten Victorian novel A Human Document (1892), transforming it into one of the most innovative artistic projects of the twentieth century. Accessible yet intellectually ambitious, this volume demonstrates why Phillips remains a central figure for understanding contemporary intermedia art and the creative reuse of cultural memory.

Contributing authors: Véronique Plesch (Colby College), Vincent Broqua (Université Paris 8), Maureen Hosay (University of Antwerp), Laura Digregorio (University of Liège), Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (Pennsylvania State University), Maria Elena Minuto (University of Liège), Steven Hendricks (The Evergreen State College), Wojciech Drąg (University of Wroclaw), Peter Middleton (University of Southampton).

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https: //about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9461668082
• ISBN13: 9789461668080
• Release Date: December 2026
• Publisher: Leuven University Press
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher