Cases of citation tracks a history of artists who incorporated literature into their work. It investigates why literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy in art made during and after the 1960s, and explores how we can account for such citational practices in contemporary scholarship.

Structured as a series of in-depth case studies, the chapters generate their own specific questions about the relationship between art and literature through the analysis of a single artwork. The volume covers a diverse group of artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including David Wojnarowicz, Marcel Broodthaers, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski. Cited authors range from Oscar Wilde to Frank O'Hara, Mary Shelley to Jean Genet. Together, the artworks and texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can 'read' textual citations in art.

The book concludes with a richly illustrated conversation between the editors and the pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek, whose lifelong engagement with text serves as a foundational art historical touchstone for the collection as a whole.