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Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. In Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War, Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research--trauma studies and comics studies--to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in American comics after the Vietnam War, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible. Using texts from across the form and placing...
Comics: An Introduction provides a clear and detailed introduction to the Comics form – including graphic narratives and a range of other genres – explaining key terms, history, theories, and major themes. The book uses a variety of examples to show the rich history as well as the current cultural relevance and significance of Comics. Taking a broadly global approach, Harriet Earle discusses the history and development of the form internationally, as well as how to navigate comics as a new way of reading. Earle also pushes beyond the book to lay out the ways that fans engage with their comics of choice – and how this can impact the industry. She also analyses how Comics can work for social change and political comment. Discussing journalism and life writing, she examines how the coming together of word and image gives us new ways to discuss our world and ourselves. A glossary and further reading section help those new to Comics solidify their understanding and further their exploration of this dynamic and growing field.
The horror anthology TV show American Horror Story first aired on FX Horror in 2011 and has thus far spanned eight seasons. Addressing many areas of cultural concern, the show has tapped in to conversations about celebrity culture, family dynamics, and more. This volume with nine new essays and one reprinted one considers how this series engages with representations of gender, sexuality, queer identities and other LGBTQ issues. The contributors address myriad elements of American Horror Story, from the relationship between gender and nature to contemporary masculinities, offering a sustained analysis of a show that has proven to be central to contemporary genre television.
First runner-up for the 2019 Ray and Pat Browne Award for the Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture Cultures of War in Graphic Novels examines the representation of small-scale and often less acknowledged conflicts from around the world and throughout history. The contributors look at an array of graphic novels about conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), the Irish struggle for national independence (1916-1998), the Falkland War (1982), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Israel-Lebanon War (2006), and the War on Terror (2001-). The book explores the multi-layered relation between the graphic novel as a popular medium and war as a pivotal recurring experience in human history. The focus on largely overlooked small-scale conflicts contributes not only to advance our understanding of graphic novels about war and the cultural aspects of war as reflected in graphic novels, but also our sense of the early twenty-first century, in which popular media and limited conflicts have become closely interrelated.
Over ten seasons since 2011, the television series American Horror Story (AHS), created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has continued to push the boundaries of the televisual form in new and exciting ways. Emerging in a context which has seen a boom in popularity for horror series on television, AHS has distinguished itself from its ‘rivals’ such as The Walking Dead, Bates Motel or Penny Dreadful through its diverse strategies and storylines which have seen it explore archetypal narratives of horror culture as well as engaging with real historical events. Utilising a repertory company model for its casting, the show has challenged issues around contemporary politics, heteronormativity, violence on the screen, and disability to name but a few. This new collection of essays approaches the AHS anthology series through a variety of critical perspectives within the broader field of television studies and its transections with other disciplines.
This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, “authorship” can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.
Burning Down the House explores the political, economic and cultural landscape of 21st-century Latin America through comics. It examines works from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Perú, Colombia, México and Spain, and the resurgence of comics in recent decades spurred by the ubiquity of the Internet and reminiscent of the complex political experiences and realities of the region. The volume analyses experimentations in themes and formats and how Latin American comics have become deeply plural in its inspirations, subjects, drawing styles and political concerns while also underlining the hybrid and diverse cultures they represent. It examines the representative and historical im...
The 1980s is remembered as a time of big hair, synthetic music, and microwave cookery. It is also remembered as the heyday of conservative politics, socioeconomic inequality, and moral panics. It is dichotomously remembered as either a nostalgic age of innocence or a regressive moral wasteland, depending on who you ask, and when. But, most of all, it is remembered. In retro fashion trends, in '80s-based film and television narratives, and through countless rebooted movies, video games, superheroes, and even political slogans imploring us to Make America Great Again (Again). More than merely a historical period, "the '80s" has grown into a contested myth, ever-evolving through the critical and expressive lens of popular culture. This book explores the many shapes the '80s mythos has taken across a diverse array of media. Essays examine television series such as Stranger Things, Cobra Kai, and POSE, films such as Dallas Buyers Club, Summer of '84, and Chocolate Babies, as well as video games, pop music, and toys. Collectively, these essays explore how representations of the 1980s influence the way we think about our past, our present, and our future.
Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.