Howard Cruse is the first biography to tell the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher's kid from Alabama who became "the godfather of queer comics," Cruse (1944-2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists. His comic strip Wendel, published in The Advocate throughout the 1980s, is considered a revolutionary moment in the development of LGBTQ+ comics, as is his inaugurating the editorship of Gay Comix with Kitchen Sink Press in 1979, which furthered the careers of important artists like Jennifer Camper and Alison Bechdel. Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, fictionalizes his own coming out in the context of the civil rights movement in 1960s Birmingham and was a significant forerunner to contemporary graphic novels and memoirs. Howard Cruse draws on extensive archival research and interviews and covers Cruse's entire body of work: the cute and zany Barefootz, the unexpected innovations of the Gay Comix stories, the domestic intimacies of Wendel, and the complexity and power of Stuck Rubber Baby. The book places Cruse's art in the context of his life and his times, including the historic movements for gay rights and against the AIDS crisis, and it celebrates this extraordinary and essential figure of LGBTQ+ comics and American comics art more broadly.

Balancing key foundational topics with new developments and trends, "Engagements with Narrative" offers an accessible introduction to narratology. As new narrative forms and media emerge, the study of narrative and the ways people communicate through imagination, empathy, and storytelling is especially relevant for students of literature today. Utell presents the foundational texts, key concepts, and big ideas that form narrative theory and practical criticism, engaging readers in the study of stories by telling the story of a field and its development.

Distinct features designed to initiate dialogue and debate include:

• Coverage of philosophical and historical contexts surrounding the study of narrative
• An introduction to essential thinkers along with the tools to both use and interrogate their work
• A survey of the most up-to-date currents, including mind theory and postmodern ethics, to stimulate conversations about how we read fiction, life writing, film, and digital media from a variety of perspectives.
• An exciting and transmedial selection of narrative texts, chosen to demonstrate critical practice and spark further reading and research
• "Theory in Practice" sections applying methodologies to a variety of texts and "Engagement" sections encouraging students to engage with narrative theory and practice through suggested research questions and prompts, and interviews with scholars

This guide teaches the key concepts of narrative time, space, character, perspective, setting while facilitating conversations among different approaches and media, and opening paths to new inquiry. "Engagements with Narrative" is ideal for readers needing an introduction to the field, as well as for those seeking insight into both its historical developments and new directions. "

Exposing how modernist and late-modernist writers tell the stories of their intimate relationships though life writing, this book engages with the process by which these authors become subjects to a significant other, a change that subsequently becomes narrative within their works. Looking specifically at partners in a couple, Janine Utell focuses on such literary pairings as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the ethics of reading relationships in the modern period. Focusing on a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, this book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.

Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Leah Anderst, Alissa S. Bourbonnais, Tyler Bradway, Natalja Chestopalova, Margaret Galvan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Katie Hogan, Jonathan M. Hollister, Yetta Howard, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Don L. Latham, Vanessa Lauber, Katherine Parker-Hay, Anne N. Thalheimer, Janine Utell, and Susan R. Van Dyne. Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In a definitive collection of original essays, scholars cover the span of Bechdel's career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The Contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel's work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory. Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel's creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form. Ultimately, the volume shows that Bechdel's work consists of performing a Series of selves-serializing the self, as it were-each constructed and refracted across and within her chosen artistic modes and genres.

Balancing key foundational topics with new developments and trends, "Engagements with Narrative" offers an accessible introduction to narratology. As new narrative forms and media emerge, the study of narrative and the ways people communicate through imagination, empathy, and storytelling is especially relevant for students of literature today. Utell presents the foundational texts, key concepts, and big ideas that form narrative theory and practical criticism, engaging readers in the study of stories by telling the story of a field and its development.

Distinct features designed to initiate dialogue and debate include:

• Coverage of philosophical and historical contexts surrounding the study of narrative
• An introduction to essential thinkers along with the tools to both use and interrogate their work
• A survey of the most up-to-date currents, including mind theory and postmodern ethics, to stimulate conversations about how we read fiction, life writing, film, and digital media from a variety of perspectives.
• An exciting and transmedial selection of narrative texts, chosen to demonstrate critical practice and spark further reading and research
• "Theory in Practice" sections applying methodologies to a variety of texts and "Engagement" sections encouraging students to engage with narrative theory and practice through suggested research questions and prompts, and interviews with scholars

This guide teaches the key concepts of narrative time, space, character, perspective, setting while facilitating conversations among different approaches and media, and opening paths to new inquiry. "Engagements with Narrative" is ideal for readers needing an introduction to the field, as well as for those seeking insight into both its historical developments and new directions. "

Exposing how modernist and late-modernist writers tell the stories of their intimate relationships though life writing, this book engages with the process by which these authors become subjects to a significant other, a change that subsequently becomes narrative within their works. Looking specifically at partners in a couple, Janine Utell focuses on such literary pairings as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the ethics of reading relationships in the modern period. Focusing on a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, this book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.

"A valid and important human situation . . . The book is vivid with the characteristic Braine sights and smells." - Kenneth Allsop, "Daily Mail"
"Triumphantly underlines the point that "Room at the Top" was no flash-in-the-pan. He alone, of the generation that has achieved celebrity in the last five years, is a genuine novelist in the great tradition." - "Yorkshire Post"
"A gifted and skilled writer . . . His prose is at its best extremely vivid." - Richard Hoggart, "The Guardian"
"The work of a real writer." - Peter Green, "The Telegraph"
"Once again Mr. Braine shows his great capacity for a tearaway narrative, for crisp dialogue and stark emotion . . . "The Vodi" increases his stature." - "London Times"
As a child, Dick Corvey discovered the existence of the Vodi, a race of ferret-faced creatures with luminous eyes responsible for all the misfortune and suffering in the world. Now fully grown, Dick lies in a sanitorium, suffering from untreatable tuberculosis. Unable to leave his hospital bed and convinced that the Vodi will win its ultimate triumph with his fast-approaching death, he spends his time remembering the many failures in his life that have led him to this point. But when an attractive nurse, Evelyn Mallaton, is transferred to Dick's ward and takes an interest in his recovery, Dick begins to believe in the possibility of regaining his health and defeating the Vodi once and for all. . . .
The hero of John Braine's smash bestseller "Room at the Top" (1957) was a man determined to succeed at all costs; in his second novel, "The Vodi" (1959), Braine depicted a very different type of character: a man who seems destined to fail. This edition of "The Vodi," which M. John Harrison has called "the defining moment of an as-yet-unreported genre: kitchen sink gothic," is the first-ever American reprint of the novel and includes a new introduction by Janine Utell.

"Remember the name John Braine. You'll be hearing quite a lot about him. Room at the Top is his first novel and it is a remarkable one . . . it's a long time since we heard the hunger of youth really snarling and it's a good sound to hear again." - "Sunday Times"
"The most discussed, debated and lauded first novel of the year." - "New York Times"
"This novel is brilliant . . . The observation is shrewd and the emotion and the comedy are so true it hurts." - "Daily Express"
Brought up amid squalor and poverty in a dead, ugly small town, young Joe Lampton has one ambition: to escape the anonymous, defeated crowd of "zombies" and make it to the top. Everything seems to be going according to plan when he moves to a new city, finds a good job and new friends, and inspires the love of a pretty girl with a rich father. Only one thing holds him back: his passionate affair with an older married woman. Forced to choose between true love and his ruthless pursuit of wealth and success, Joe will have to make a terrible decision, with violent and tragic consequences.
"Room at the Top" (1957), the first novel by John Braine (1922-1986), earned widespread critical acclaim and was a runaway bestseller in England and America, running into dozens of printings and spawning a sequel and an Oscar-winning film adaptation. Still explosive more than half a century later, Braine's classic of the "Angry Young Men" movement returns to print in this edition, which features a new introduction by Janine Utell and the original jacket art by John Minton.

Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Leah Anderst, Alissa S. Bourbonnais, Tyler Bradway, Natalja Chestopalova, Margaret Galvan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Katie Hogan, Jonathan M. Hollister, Yetta Howard, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Don L. Latham, Vanessa Lauber, Katherine Parker-Hay, Anne N. Thalheimer, Janine Utell, and Susan R. Van Dyne. Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In a definitive collection of original essays, scholars cover the span of Bechdel's career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The Contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel's work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory. Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel's creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form. Ultimately, the volume shows that Bechdel's work consists of performing a Series of selves-serializing the self, as it were-each constructed and refracted across and within her chosen artistic modes and genres.

Howard Cruse is the first biography to tell the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher's kid from Alabama who became "the godfather of queer comics," Cruse (1944-2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists. His comic strip Wendel, published in The Advocate throughout the 1980s, is considered a revolutionary moment in the development of LGBTQ+ comics, as is his inaugurating the editorship of Gay Comix with Kitchen Sink Press in 1979, which furthered the careers of important artists like Jennifer Camper and Alison Bechdel. Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, fictionalizes his own coming out in the context of the civil rights movement in 1960s Birmingham and was a significant forerunner to contemporary graphic novels and memoirs. Howard Cruse draws on extensive archival research and interviews and covers Cruse's entire body of work: the cute and zany Barefootz, the unexpected innovations of the Gay Comix stories, the domestic intimacies of Wendel, and the complexity and power of Stuck Rubber Baby. The book places Cruse's art in the context of his life and his times, including the historic movements for gay rights and against the AIDS crisis, and it celebrates this extraordinary and essential figure of LGBTQ+ comics and American comics art more broadly.