The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students.

Close Reading New Media is the first publication to apply the method of close analysis to new media.Since the early nineteen-nineties, electronic art and literature have continually gained importance in artistic and academic circles. Significant critical and theoretical attention has been paid to how new media allow the text to break traditional power relations and boundaries. The passive reader becomes an active participant choosing his own path and assembling not just his own interpretation of the text (level of the signified), but also his own text (level of the signifier). Texts no longer have a beginning or an ending, being a web of interlinked nodes. The decentered nature of electronic text empowers and invites the reader to take part in the literary process. Poststructuralist theorists predicted a total liberation of textual restrictions imposed by the medium of print. However, while these are culturally significant claims, little attention has been paid to their realization. The goal of this volume is twofold. Our aim is to shed light on how ideas and theories have been translated into concrete works, and we want to comment on the process of close reading and how it can be applied to electronic literature. While all contributions deal with particular works, their aim is always to provide insight into how electronic fiction and new media can be read.This book proposes close readings of work by Mark Amerika, Darren Aronofsky, M.D. Coverley, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Rick Pryll, Geoff Ryman and Stephanie Strickland.

Lieven Gavaert Series 4

"Critical realism is a way of seeking to understand the social reality by critically 'making notes' of it. . . . As scratches of reality, Sekula's photographs and films leave their traces in our minds. They encourage, yes, even force reflection, and through that, slow changes can probably become a reality, certainly at the level of the individual." from the Introduction, "A Note on Critical Realism Today"

The American photographer Allan Sekula teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. His oeuvre features a number of unique characteristics that instigate a strong plea for art to become once more critically engaged. Sekula's iconography rediscovers the theme of labor and his photographs, on the verge between art and documentary, reflect on the possibility that visual art might again deliver an "act of criticism." In the art world, for several decades now, realism has been relegated to the museum of premodern styles and devices, and the idea of social commitment in art has become confused; even when contemporary art carries a strong political message, it often does so in a way that masks the message within a tangle of conceptual devices and abstractions.

Sekula's photography has triggered intense debate about the ways in which art can take a critical position on social questions without succumbing to a plainspoken or partisan stance. In Critical Realism in Contemporary Art, leading theorists of art use Sekula's work as a starting point for wide-ranging discussions of technology, history, and society as they are reflected in today's photographic practice."

This book provides both students and scholars with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyse graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: what is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? The authors address these and many other questions raised by the genre. Through their analysis of the works of many well-known graphic novelists - including Bechdel, Clowes, Spiegelman and Ware - Baetens and Frey offer significant insights for future teaching and research on the graphic novel.

This book provides both students and scholars with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyse graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: what is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? The authors address these and many other questions raised by the genre. Through their analysis of the works of many well-known graphic novelists - including Bechdel, Clowes, Spiegelman and Ware - Baetens and Frey offer significant insights for future teaching and research on the graphic novel.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. Using key examples, this volume reviews the historical development of various subgenres within the graphic novel tradition and examines how graphic novelists have created multiple and different accounts of the American experience, including that of African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities. Reading the American graphic novel opens a debate on how major works have changed the idea of America from that once found in the quintessential action or superhero comics to show new, different, intimate accounts of historical change as well as social and individual, personal experience. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.

The first volume of the new series "European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies" focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe's intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the "other Europe(s)" that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.

The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. Using key examples, this volume reviews the historical development of various subgenres within the graphic novel tradition and examines how graphic novelists have created multiple and different accounts of the American experience, including that of African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities. Reading the American graphic novel opens a debate on how major works have changed the idea of America from that once found in the quintessential action or superhero comics to show new, different, intimate accounts of historical change as well as social and individual, personal experience. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.

Discarded by archivists and disregarded by scholars despite its cultural impact on post-World War II Europe, the film photonovel represents a unique crossroads. This hybrid medium presented popular films in a magazine format that joined film stills or set pictures with captions and dialogue balloons to re-create a cinematic story, producing a tremendously popular blend of cinema and text that supported more than two dozen weekly or monthly publications. Illuminating a long-overlooked 'lowbrow' medium with a significant social impact, The Film Photonovel studies the history of the format as a hybrid of film novelizations, drawn novels, and nonfilm photonovels. While the field of adaptation studies has tended to focus on literary adaptations, this book explores how the juxtaposition of words and pictures functioned in this format and how page layout and photo cropping could affect reading. Finally, the book follows the film photonovel's brief history in Latin America and the United States. Adding an important dimension to the interactions between filmmakers and their audiences, this work fills a gap in the study of transnational movie culture.

Correspondance is the name of a Belgian Surrealist magazine published in 1924-1925 by Paul Nouge, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte. It is considered as seminal as Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto" (1924). The texts were tart, obscure responses to the arcane literary debates of the time, in particular those underway in Andre Breton's circle in Paris. Twenty-two issues of Correspondance were printed, in a modernist typeface on different color papers, and were distributed by mail to selected recipients. Unlike their Parisian associates, the Belgians made an explicit choice against the book as a host medium for literary and other experiments. Nouge, the chief theorist, and his colleagues remained suspicious throughout their careers not only of commercialized literature, but also of literature itself, which they saw as a means to political action, never a goal in itself. Although little recognized, Belgian Surrealists and Correspondance, their earliest manifestation, remain anticipatory and influential in modernist writing practice, especially for their ephemeral style of publishing (proto-mail art) and their intentional plagiarisms (precursor to Situationist detournement).

Franse literatuur na 1945 is een driedelig, Nederlandstalig overzichtswerk dat de belangrijkste literaire, theoretische en essayistische stromingen in het naoorlogse Franse literaire veld in kaart wil brengen. Elk volume bestaat uit een algemene inleiding gevolgd door een tiental bijdragen van Franse, Nederlandse en Belgische specialisten. De essays zijn op een toegankelijke manier geschreven zonder evenwel aan kwaliteit en precisie in te boeten. Het perspectief van de verschillende bijdragen is zowel monografisch als kritisch: ze geven een overzicht van het werk van de geselecteerde auteurs met de nodige aandacht voor de intertekstuele en contextuele inbedding en ze maken eveneens een tussentijdse balans op. Alle bijdragen worden bovendien gevolgd door een beknopte primaire en secundaire literatuurlijst, zodat de lezer zelf aan de slag kan. Franse literatuur na 1945 is dus duidelijk meer dan een louter encyclopedisch naslagwerk: "klassieke" namen worden aan een eigentijdse evaluatie onderworpen en "onbekende figuren" worden voor het eerst in het Nederlandse taalgebied geintroduceerd. Een zorgvuldig en internationaal samengestelde ploeg moet borg staan voor de kwaliteit van het geheel. Het eerste volume van dit driedelige werk over de naoorlogse Franse literatuur opent met een algemene inleiding waarin een overzicht wordt gegeven van de belangrijkste stromingen en figuren. De monografische essays belichten achtereenvolgens Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Yourcenar, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Yves Bonnefoy, Claude Simon en Georges Perec. Elke bijdrage wordt afgesloten met een beknopte literatuurlijst.