In 1822, just before Christmas, London publisher Rudolph Ackermann produced a beautiful volume called Forget-Me-Not: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1823. Filled with pictures accompanied by poetry, the Forget-Me-Not inspired myriad imitators, known collectively as literary annuals. By the early 1830s, the Forget-Me-Not and its roughly one hundred competitors---each selling edition sizes in the thousands if not tens of thousands---were given by their purchasers as holiday gifts to friends or family. Despite literary annuals' popularity, which lasted into the 1850s, their peculiar media conventions and contributions to contemporary cultural discourse have not been well understood. This dissertation recovers literary annuals' significance through the relationship between texts and images in their pages. Typically, annuals' editors began with pictures (usually steel-plate engravings), and then hired contributing authors to write poetry or prose to accompany each one.

I examine annuals' use of ekphrasis---or in the annuals' terms, "poetical illustration"---as it is understood in neuroscientific and psychoanalytic studies: as an artistic display of proprioceptive or cross-modal thinking, processes that are central to one's ability to differentiate oneself from others, and which allow for inter-subjective experience as well. I also incorporate analyses of ekphrasis that compare the text's approach to the image with the self's approach to otherness, as well as accounts that emphasize the importance of affect in the interpretation of images. From this standpoint I consider in detail annuals' contributions to two overlapping discourses in early 19th-century Britain: the development of a national historiography that comprehended the increasingly politically-empowered middle class (annuals' primary audience), and the development of British imperialism in Asia, particularly India and China.

By looking at topical trends in several of the longest-running literary annuals over time, including the Oriental Annual, Finden's Tableaux, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrapbook, and The Keepsake, I show how the multimedia practice of "poetical illustration" facilitated improvisational engagements with historiographic and imperialist discourses. By closely reading several annuals, I demonstrate their social contribution beyond their circulation as gifts. In their unique employment of ekphrasis, they characterized the production of Britain's self-image as contingent, improvisational, and constantly negotiable.