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Graphic Novels / Popular Culture / Autobiography

 

Graphic Subjects
Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels
Edited by Michael A. Chaney


Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography

"This is a varied but well-focused collection of essays that is more thorough than anything else in print. Readers of graphic novels and autobiography will need to start here to learn the basic principles of discussion and terms of discourse."
—M. Thomas Inge, author of Comics as Culture

Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman's Maus, David Beauchard's Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and Gene Yang's American Born Chinese.

These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate the new horizons that illustrated autobiographical narrative creates. The volume insightfully highlights the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and life stories into their work. The result is a challenging and innovative collection that reveals the combined power of autobiography and the graphic novel.

"A fascinating volume that makes a distinguished contribution to not one but two burgeoning fields of scholarly inquiry. The contributors make skillful use of literary theories, case studies, and personal histories to investigate the distinctive way that comics present and shape auto-biographical narratives and discourses."—Kent Worcester, coeditor of A Comics Studies Reader and Arguing Comics

Michael A. Chaney is associate professor of English at Dartmouth College and author of Fugitive Vision.

Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
William L. Andrews, General Editor


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The cover of Chaney's book is a collage of cartoon sketches.

March 2011
LC: 2010038904 PN
336 pp.   6 x 9   50 b/w illus.

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Paper $26.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-25104-8
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Contributors:
Jan Baetens, Bart Beaty, Bella Brodzki, Isaac Cates, Michael A. Chaney, Hillary Chute, Rocio G. Davis, James Dorsey, Damian Duffy, Paul John Eakin, Victoria A. Elmwood, Leigh Gilmore, Phoebe Gloeckner, Ian Gordon, David Herman, Marianne Hirsch, Andrea A. Lunsford, Erin McGlothlin, Nima Naghibi, Linda Haverty Rugg, Sidonie Smith, Domna C. Stanton, Stephen E. Tabachnick, Theresa Tensuan, Julia Watson, Carolyn Williams, and Joseph Witek

   

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Updated December 14, 2011

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