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Neil Gaiman (1960-present) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically-decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy-award winning DC/ Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally-renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc. award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comic reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language making him a celebrity on a world-wide scale. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to multiple national comics traditions (from such works as Miracleman to the aforementioned The Sandman), to the maturation of American comics as a serious storytelling medium, and to changing the rights of creators to retain ownership of their works, his work continues to be underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. As American Gods tops ratings charts for Starz, Anansi Boys can be found in radio play from the BBC, and adaptations of some of his work from Trigger Warning and Fragile Things become standalone comics by renowned artists, it seems timely to bring the bulk of Gaiman's comics into the scholarly discussion. The thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, a formal introduction, forward, and afterword examine the work (specifically-comics, graphic novels, picture books, visual adaptations of prose works, etc.) of Gaiman and a multitude of his collaborative illustrators. The essays radiate from an examination of Gaiman's work surrounding proclamations challenging his readers to "make good art'; what makes Gaiman's work unique and worthy of study lies in his eschewing of typical categorizations and typologies, his constant efforts to make good art-whatever form that art may take-howsoever the genres and audiences may slip into one another. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who always seems fully-assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and his own voice far later in his life.

Julie Doucet, who started publishing in the late 1980s, is a cartoonist and artist best known for her semi-auto biographical works, as depicted in her Dirty Plotte series as well as My New York Diary. Coming into her own in the late 1990s, when she first started self-publishing her comics, Gabrielle Bell rose to prominence with her 2009 book of short story comics, Cecil and Jordan in New York, as well as her diary comics, which have been recurrently collected in full-length books. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and world view, the essays in this book investigate these artists' shared investments informal innovation and experimentation and in playing with question soft he auto biographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between. This volume brings to gether eight original essays, including an extensive introduction, in addition to five republished interviews with the artists. Utilizing a variety of methodologies (archival work, gender theory, genre theory, etc.), the engagements in this book reflect how, despite the importance of finding “a place in side yourself” in order to create, this space is always, for better or worse, also as hared space, culled from, and subject to, surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities. Both the world of comics and its critics have been male-dominated for too long. The essays in this volume allow us to think about women’s place in the comics canon, while also appreciating Doucet and Bell as unique artists with powerful personal visions.

The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets is a biography and analysis of the work of Rutu Modan, a groundbreaking female graphic novelist from Israel. Modan is best known for her two graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property. Modan’s work depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust, and most significantly, the effects of war and trauma on individuals. This book begins with a history of Israeli cartooning from its roots in early Zionism. It provides an in-depth look at the female Israeli cartoonists who preceded Modan, as well as the counter-culture Israeli comics of the 1970s and the art comics boom of the 1990s. The book explores Modan's comics within the Israeli historical, political, sociological and literary background. It offers a history of the comics collective Actus Tragicus, of which Modan was a founder, and shows how the collective paved the way for modern comics to take root in Israel. Using the recurring themes of absence and presence, the book analyzes Modan's strong female characters, the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in her work, and the lingering effects of the Holocaust on Israeli society. The book also explores Modan's lesser-known but still important projects, including her comics journalism, her family narratives, and her line of children's comics that revitalizes Israeli classics.

The matter of money touches the writer's life at every point:in the need to make ends meet, in daily dealings with agents, editors, and publishers, and in the choice of subject matter and the lineaments of the imagined world.William Faulkner was no exception.The people and communities he wrote about were deeply entangled in personal, local, regional, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as was the author himself, whose economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century.This collection brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel laureate and new questions about his art.Essays address economies of debt and gift-giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.The Faulkner we meet in these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

With the rise of new scholarly paradigms in the study of Native American histories and cultures, and the emergence of the Native South as a key concept in US southern studies, the time is more than ripe for a critical reassessment of Native sites, characters, communities, customs, narratives, ways of knowing, and other indigenous elements in the writings of William Faulkner—and of Faulkner’s significance for Native American writers, artists, and intellectuals. From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based worldviews to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Indian topics), the eleven essays of this volume take the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner beyond no-longer generative assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations or the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters, turning instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics is the first full-length critical study to examine the important cadre of young female protagonists that permeated US newspapers strips and comics books during the first half of the twentieth century.Many of the earliest, most successful, and most influential titles from this era featured elementary-aged girls as their central characters, such as Little Orphan Annie, Nancy, and Little Lulu. Far from embodying a now-forgotten facet of twentieth century print culture, these figures remain icons ofUS popular and material culture. Recognizing the cadre of Funny Girls who played such a significant role in the popular appeal and commercial success of American comics during the first half of the twentieth century challenges longstanding perceptions about the gender dynamics operating during this era.In addition, they provide information about a wide range of socio-political issues, including the popular perceptions about children, mainstream representations of girlhood, and changing national attitudes regarding youth and youth culture.Finally, but just as importantly, strips like Little Lulu, Little Orphan Annie, and Nancy also shed light on another major phenomenon within comics:branding, licensing, and merchandising. In discussing these are other issues, Funny Girls gives much needed attention to an influential, but long neglected, aspect of comics history in the United States.

Krokodil produced state-sanctioned satirical comments on Soviet and international affairs from 1922 onward. Authored by professional and non-professional contributors, and published by Pravda in Moscow, it became the satirical magazine with the largest circulation in the world. Every Soviet citizen and every scholar of the USSR was familiar with Krokodil as the most significant and influential source of graphic satire in the USSR. This book uses an original framework for reconsidering the forms, production, consumption, and functions of Krokodil magazine. It considers the magazine's content, structures and conventions; it also uses modern cultural and media theory to look beyond content analysis to consider visual language and the performative construction of character. Empirical analysis of Krokodil is thus used to extend and nuance our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond state-sponsored propaganda. In several ways, this book challenges existing approaches. It conducts close readings of a large range of different types of cartoons that have not before been discussed in depth, and it does so in ways that reveal new insights. It shows that Krokodil's satire was complex, subtle and intermedial. It highlights the importance of Krokodil's readers' and artists' collaborative exploration and shaping of the boundaries of permissible discourse, and it argues that Krokodil's cartoons simultaneously affirmed, refracted and critiqued official discourses, counterposing them with visions of Soviet citizens' responses. Ideology, Krokodil's satire suggests, is an interpretive tool for negotiating everyday reality and official discourses, and it was not always to be taken seriously.

Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies talks about things folklorists don’t usually talk about. It ponders the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they talk about folklore and how those expectations necessarily affect the folklore they are talking about. The book’s chapters are wide-ranging in subject and style, yet they all orbit the idea that much of folklore, both as a phenomenon and as a field, hinges upon tacit or absent assumptions about who we are and what it is that we do. The authors articulate theories and methodologies for making sense of these absences, and, in the process, they offer critical new insights into discussions of race, authenticity, community, folklore and literature, popular culture, and scholarly authority. Taken as a whole, the book represents a new and challenging way of looking into the ways that groups come together to make meaning. In addition to the main chapters, the book also includes eight “interstitials,” shorter chapters that consider understudied and under-appreciated aspects of folklore. These discussions, which range from a consideration of knitting in public to the ways that invisibility shapes an internet meme to Bob Dylan, are presented as questions more than answers, encouraging readers to think about what folklore and folklore studies might look like if practitioners only chose to look at the subject from a slightly different angle.

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal-era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression, to World War II, to the Civil Rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front have not only been about the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. The book considers tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid. Labor Pains emphasizes feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives by George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. Each employs tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism come into view.

When we generalize about children, we are often also implicitly generalizing about their care, from within a "middle-class" view of "nuclear" family. These as sumptions rely on anorm that few of us actually fit. Yet it is very difficult to talk about children from completely outside of such an assumed model of support in the private or "islanded" sphere. In contrast, children in literature are just as often disconnected from family in order to have greater adventures in more public spaces. They must leave the confines of the private family to for gean other sphere in which to grow. But the real experiences of children at tempting public connection or freedom to roam are farmore complicated, ranging from captivity and containment to escape and self-reliance. Utilizing both fictions of child adventure and accounts of experiences by actual children, Honey mandemonstrates that childwelfare depends upon not just protection, but also participation. How can protection, which sounds so comforting, do harm? Perils of Protection will trace how the best of intentions to protect children can none the lesshurt them if leaving them unprepared to acton the irown behalf. Each chapter will center on this perilous pattern in a different context: "women and children first" rescue hierarchies, geographic restriction, abandonment, censorship, and illness. Analysis from adventures real and fictionalized will offer the reader high jinx and heroism at sea, the rush of risk, finding new families, resisting censorship through discovering shared political identity, and breaking the pretences of sentimentality.