Darger's Resources (Paperback)

Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger's unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger's resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children's books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher.

General

Imprint:	Duke University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	March 2012
First published:	2012
Authors:	Michael Moon
Dimensions:	158 x 234 x 11mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	168
ISBN-13:	978-0-8223-5156-6
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > General Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Painting & paintings > General Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Individual artists > General Promotions
LSN:	0-8223-5156-0
Barcode:	9780822351566

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