Lynd Ward's Wordless Novels, 1929-1937

Visual Narrative, Cultural Politics, Homoeroticism
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-21116-9
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 244 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 512 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture

This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group – much like Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Keats’s great odes – in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward’s novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scott, Grant F.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Origins

Chapter 1: The Silent Film, the Sketch and the Portrait in Gods’ Man (1929)

Chapter 2: Colonial Legacy and the Crime of Scholarship in Madman’s Drum (1930)

Chapter 3: Lynching, Labor and Homoeroticism in Wild Pilgrimage (1932)

Chapter 4: Disobedient Persuasions: Prelude to a Million Years (1933)

Chapter 5: The Limits of Allegory: Song Without Words (1936) and Hymn for the Night (ca. 1940)

Chapter 6: The Duplicity of the Word in Vertigo (1937)

Epilogue: Dance of the Hours; or, Lynd Ward’s Last Unfinished Wordless Novel (2001)

Über Autor(innen)

Grant F. Scott is a Professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and author of The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (1994). He has also edited Selected Letters of John Keats (2002), Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs (2005) and The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843 (2016), and co-edited, with Sue Brown, New Letters from Charles Brown to Joseph Severn (2010).