Alexander Dunst

Bringing digital humanities methods to the study of comics, this monograph traces the emergence of the graphic novel at the intersection of popular and literary culture. Based on a representative corpus of over 250 graphic novels from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, it shows how the genre has built on the visual style of comics while adopting selected features of the contemporary novel. This argument positions the graphic novel as a crucial case study for our understanding of twenty-first-century culture. More than simply a niche format, graphic novels demonstrate how contemporary literature reworks elements of genre narrative, reconfiguring rather than abolishing distinctions between high and low. The book also puts forward a new historical periodization for the graphic novel, centered on integration into the literary marketplace and leading to an explosive growth in page length and a diversification of aesthetic styles.

Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value

The Rise of the Graphic Novel

This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America’s political and cultural debates. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason—romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia’s superior insight. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology.

Mad America

Madness in Cold War America

Janina Wildfeuer

Jochen Laubrock

This edited volume brings together work in the field of empirical comics research. Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels. Individual chapters focus on corpus studies, the potential of crowdsourcing for comics research, annotation and narrative analysis, cognitive processing and reception studies. This volume opens up new perspectives for the study of visual narrative, making it a key reference for anyone interested in the scientific study of art and literature as well as the digital humanities.

Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods

Empirical Comics Research

Stefan Schlensag

As the first essay collection dedicated to Philip K. Dick in over two decades, this volume breaks new ground in science fiction scholarship and brings innovative critical perspectives to the study of one of the America's most influential authors. With contributions by major voices in literary and cultural studies, the book thoroughly situates Dick in the history of the twentieth century and includes sections on cultural theory, adaptation studies, as well as the first in-depth discussion of his last major work, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, only published in 2011. Dick's academic reputation and general popularity continue to grow. A steady flow of films based on his novels and short stories, and several biographies and critical monographs over the last decade, testify to his global appeal. As the publication of three volumes of selected novels in the prestigious Library of America series and a 900-page hardback edition of his Exegesis show, Dick is now considered a canonical author in US literature. The essays commissioned for this volume examine novel aspects of Dick's oeuvre and revise our understanding of a writer who is now seen as a major literary and intellectual figure and often taken as representative of science fiction at large. At the same time, the conceptual and methodological arguments put forward by the authors –from Mark Bould's analysis of 'slipstream cinema' and Laurence Rickels' theorization of psychopathy to Marcus Boon's ontology of the withdrawn object – will be of interest to a wide audience in literary and cultural studies.

Alexander Dunst

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