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Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.

This overview of the history of Canadian comics explores not only the few Canadian cartoonists who have received study, but many who have not. Contributors look at the myriad ways that English-language, Francophone, indigenous, and queer Canadian comics and cartoonists pose alternatives to American comics, to dominant perceptions, even to gender and racial categories. Specific works covered range from the earliest Canadian comic books to the work of contemporary creators. In contrast to the United States’ melting pot, Canada has been understood to comprise a social, cultural, and ethnic mosaic, with distinct cultural variation as part of its identity. This volume reveals differences that often reflect in highly regional and localized comics such as Paul MacKinnon’s Cape Breton-specific Old Trout Funnies, Michel Rabagliati’s Montreal-based Paul comics, and Kurt Martell and Christopher Merkley’s Thunder Bay-specific zombie apocalypse. The collection also considers some of the conventionally “alternative” cartoonists, such as Seth, Dave Sim, and Chester Brown. It offers alternate views of the diverse and engaging work of two very different Canadian cartoonists who bring their own alternatives into play: Jeff Lemire in his bridging of Canadian/US and mainstream / alternative sensibilities and Nina Bunjevac in her own blending of realism and fantasy as well as of insider / outsider status. Despite an upsurge in research on Canadian comics, there is still remarkably little written about most major and all minor Canadian cartoonists.This volume provides insight into some of the lesser-known Canadian alternatives still awaiting full exploration.

In the most comprehensive and authoritative source on this subject, this book covers almost all comics art forms in mainland China, providing the history from the nineteenth century to the present as well as perspectives on both the industry and the art form. This volume encompasses political, social, and gag cartoons, lianhuanhua (picture books), comic books, humorous drawings, cartoon and humor periodicals, and donghua (animation) while exploring topics ranging from the earliest Western-influenced cartoons and the popular, often salacious, 1930s humor magazines to cartoons as wartime propaganda and comics art in the reform. Coupling a comprehensive review of secondary materials (histories, anthologies, biographies, memoirs, and more) in English and Chinese with the artists' actual works, the result spans more than two centuries of Chinese animation. Structured chronologically, the study begins with precursors in early China and proceeds through the Republican, wartime, Communist, and market economy periods. Based primarily on interviews the editors conducted with over one hundred cartoonists, animators, and other comics art figures, Comics Art in China sheds light on tumult and triumphs. Lent and Xu describe the evolution of Chinese comics within a global context, probing the often-tense relationship between expression and government, as well as proving that art can be a powerful force for revolution. Enhanced with over one hundred black-and-white and color illustrations, this book stands out as not only the first such survey in English, but perhaps the most complete one in any language.

Conflict is one of the most prevalent themes in comics, film and literature; we have been writing stories of war and violence since time immemorial. Comics is no stranger to such narratives and is writing them in ways that are different from (and complementary to) literature and film. This book brings together two distinct areas of research–trauma studies and comics–to provide a new interpretation of this long-standing central theme. Focusing on representations of conflict and war in post-Vietnam American comics, it claims that the comics form is able to mimic traumatic experience in order to represent the events as accurately and viscerally as possible. The textual focus spans the whole form, placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics. The specific comics fit a narrow set of criteria, all being published after 1975 by American creators, discussed in conversation with critical material from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. This book is structured around six key issues in conflict and traumatic representation, with close analyses of the chosen texts to consider the effectiveness of comics, both formally and thematically, in the areas of mourning, dreams, and personal identity. Comics, Trauma and the New Art of War also consider how timescales, temporality, and postmodernism affect, and are affected by, the dual focus of comics and trauma.

Media narratives in popular culture often ascribe interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age. In the manner of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, the authors in this volume envision the presumed semblance between children and the elderly as a root metaphor that finds succinct articulation in the idea that “children are like old people” and vice versa. The volume explores the recurrent use of this root metaphor in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The authors demonstrate how it shapes and is reinforced by a spectrum of media products from Western and East-Asian countries. Most the media products addressed were developed for children as their primary audience, and range from children’s classics such as Heidi to recent Dutch children’s books about euthanasia. Various authors also consider narratives produced either for adults (for instance, the TV series Mad Men, and the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) or for a dual audience (for example, the family film Paddington or The Simpsons). The diversity of these products in terms of geography, production date, and audience buttresses a broad comparative exploration of the connection between childhood and old age, allowing the authors to bring out culturally specific aspects and biases. Finally, since this book also unites scholars from a variety of disciplines (media studies, children’s literature studies, film studies, pedagogy, sociology), the individual chapters provide a range of methods for studying the connection between childhood and old age.

Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past explores the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they impact upon individual lives. Through their historically-informed self-writings, the five Caribbean authors that have been selected for this study–Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière–offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with and reconciling with their past, both collective and individual. A central question is the conceptual link between singular and plural, between personal and collective notions of history and the connections that exist between them. The employment of ‘personal narratives’ as the vehicle to carry out this investigation encompasses the tension that is evident in the writers’ reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal and is embodied in the idea of ‘their past’–a complex, rhizomatic network that extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. The contrasting yet complementary nature of the book’s title–connecting histories and the personal past-underlines the existence of a shared past of which the five writers are deeply conscious, but also their own past, which overlaps with these historical inheritances. The book’s central focus, then, is trifold: it concerns a collective, and to some extent documented and shared, historical past; a more variable, unique, personal past revealed in the ‘personal narratives’ of the five authors as well as on the connections between these two pasts.

Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction continues where Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (2014) left off. This anthology features essays depicting Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular attention paid to China, Japan, India, and Korea. The collection concentrates on political representations of Asian identity in science fiction’s imagination, from fear of the Yellow Peril and its host of stereotypes to techno-Orientalism and the remains of a post-colonial heritage. In fact, Dis-Orienting Planets engages the extremely negative and racist connotations of “orientalism” that obscure time, place, and identity perceptions of Asians, so-called yellow and brown peoples, in this historically white genre, provokes debate on the pervading imperialistic terminologies, and reconfigures the study of race in science fiction. In this respect, the title “disses” culturally inaccurate representations of the eastern hemisphere. In three parts, the seventeen collected essays consider the racial politics governing the renewed visibility of the Orient in science fiction. The first part emphasizes the interpretive challenges of science fictional meetings between the East and West by investigating entwined racial and political tensions. The second part concentrates on the tropes of Yellow Peril and techno-Orientalism, where fear of and desire for Orientalized futures generate racial anxiety and war. The third section explores technologized Asian subjectivities in the eco-critical spaces of mainland China, the Pacific Rim, the Korean peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. Clearly, our future visions must absolutely include all people of color.

William Faulkner’s first ventures into print culture began far from the world of highbrow publishing with which he is typically associated—the world of New York publishing houses, little magazines, and literary prizes—though they would come to encompass that world as well. This collection explores Faulkner’s multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the US and international print cultures of his era, along with the ways in which these cultures have mediated his relationship with a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences. The essays gathered here address the place of Faulkner and his writings in the creation, design, publishing, marketing, reception, and collecting of books, in the culture of twentieth-century magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals (from pulp to avant-garde), in the history of modern readers and readerships, and in the construction and cultural politics of literary authorship. Six contributors focus on Faulkner’s sensational 1931 novel Sanctuary as a case study illustrating the author’s multifaceted relationship to the print ecology of his time, tracing the novel’s path from the wellsprings of Faulkner’s artistic vision to the novel’s reception among reviewers, tastemakers, intellectuals, and other readers of the early 1930s. Faulkner’s midcentury critical rebranding as a strictly highbrow modernist, disdainful of the market and impervious to literary trends or the corruption of commerce, has buried the much more interesting complexity of his ongoing engagements with print culture and its engagements with him. This collection will spur critical interest in the intersection of Faulkner’s writing career and the unrespectable, experimental, and audacious realities of interwar and Cold War print culture.

In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, this book addresses two questions: which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each chapter ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding. The chapters examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One chapter discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another chapter reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human. Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each author, graphic novelist, and artist are all doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.

One of the most significant transformations in literature for children and young adults during the last twenty years has been the resurgence of comics. Educators and librarians extol the benefits of comics reading, and increasingly, children's and young adult comics and comics hybrids have won major prizes, including the Printz Award and the National Book Award. Despite the popularity and influence of children's and young adult graphic novels, the genre has not received adequate scholarly attention. This book offers a critical examination of children's and YA comics. The anthology is divided into five sections: structure and narration; transmedia; pedagogy; gender and sexuality; and identity, that reflect crucial issues and recurring topics in comics scholarship during the twenty-first century. The chapters analyze a variety of contemporary comics, including such highly popular series as Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Lumberjanes; Eisner award-winning graphic novels by Gene Luen Yang, Nate Powell, Mariko Tamaki, and Jillian Tamaki; as well as volumes frequently challenged for use in secondary classrooms, such as Raina Telgemeier's Drama and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focuses on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they an immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries revise the traditional white male bildungsroman to negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children’s and teenagers’ identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; the fluidity and ambiguity of the biracial or mestizo Filipino male and female’s ethnic and racial identities; interracial friendships between Japanese Americans and Americans of other ethnicities during the Japanese internment; transnational adoptions and birth searches by Korean Americans; food as a means of assimilation and resistance for first generation immigrant Vietnamese American girls; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror for South Asian American teenagers; and commodity racism and the tourist gaze as well as self-authorship, interstitial identity, and the ambiguity of motherland in Hawaiian American literature.

The book proposes a critical study of the work by Latino cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, a key voice in the controversial topic of immigration. It contends that his production is significant for its documentation of the travails of the community and its assessment of the frictions resulting from a radical shift in national demographics: the rise of Latinos as the largest minority ethnicity and the eventual transition of the general population into a mode of plurality rather than majority. In his cartoons and comic strips, readers can recognize how Latinos have been used by opportunist politicians and media personalities seeking personal benefit. It is also possible to visualize how, in many cases, the political system has operated against Latinos in an almost systematic fashion, failing to acknowledge their lengthy historical record and contributions as Americans. The book chronicles the cartoonist’s evolution from a cultural actor willing to criticize injustice for the sake of retribution to one who effectively identifies and denounces the mechanisms behind rampant societal inequity—most crucially, the dynamics and implications of a hidden mainstream norm, supportive of a cultural ideology benefiting an exclusive segment of the population. In the evolution of his production, the search for a more acute representation and dissection of prejudice and exclusion becomes plain. In a sense, Alcaraz’s work is a testament not only to the growing pains of Latinos, but most importantly to those of the entire nation, as it comes to terms with the redefinition of US identity in the twenty-first century.

This book argues that the narrative/world-building technique known as retroactive continuity, often overlooked by literary scholars and media historians alike, has become a naturalized and ubiquitous part of popular culture. A careful look at the history of retroactive continuity–or retconning– reveals how its growing acceptance as a part of popular narratives has led to a complex, complicated understanding of the ways in which history and story can interact, ultimately creating a cultural atmosphere that is increasingly accepting of revisionist historical narratives. This can be seen most potently in the way that the editable hyperlink, rather than the stable footnote, has become the de facto source of information in America today. The groundwork for this major cultural shift has been laid for decades via our modes of entertainment. To embrace the concept of retroactive continuity in fictional media means accepting that the past, itself, is not a stable element, but rather something that is constantly in contentious flux. Thus retconning, on the whole, has a positive impact on society, fostering a sense of history itself as a constructed narrative and engendering an acceptance of how historical narratives can and should be recast to allow for a broader field of stories to be told in the present.

While recent scholarship has amply demonstrated that Eudora Welty was a writer with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, she continues to be categorized as a “regionalist” writer whose works valorize the white privilege from which she benefited. To assume this is Welty’s intention is to misread much of her work. This volume offers ways to navigate Welty’s sometimes complex prose and enriches readers’ understanding of Welty’s era and region. It offers teachers less simplistic approaches to the stories most frequently taught, and it steers them to less familiar texts. In addition, this book seeks to move Welty beyond a discussion of region to reflect new scholarship that “remaps” her work onto a larger canvas. Now more than ever, teachers need guidance in navigating the critical landscape and in preparing to introduce Welty texts to students in varied teaching settings and diverse classrooms. As the essays in this book demonstrate, Welty’s works are being read and taught across the globe. Her works enrich courses taught at many levels, from high school to community college to the university level. This book gives readers a window into the teaching practices of distinguished and veteran scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers. Their work can guide instructors new to Welty as well as seasoned Welty scholars who are eager for fresh classroom approaches and new material to offer a new generation of students.

Twenty-First Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature employs methodologies from material feminism to demonstrate how feminist thinking has influenced literature for the young in the last two decades. Material feminism provides people with ways of thinking about the interactions among discourse, embodiment, technology, the environment, cognition, and the ethics of caring. This book thus applies the principles behind material feminism and interrelated manifestations of feminism (such as Critical Race Theory and ecofeminism) to texts written for the young to demonstrate how shifting cultural perceptions of feminism affect what is happening both in publishing for the young and in the academic study of children’s and adolescent literature. The work begins with a specific focus on how language and the material interact before moving to an examination of race as an intersectionally-lived material phenomenon and a social construction. How embodied individuals interact with the environment is explored through ecofeminism and the dystopic; how people interact with each other involves romance, sexuality, and feminist ethics. In other words, the structure of the book moves from examinations of the individual to examinations of the individual in social groups, the individual and the environment, and the individual within relationships. Overall, the goal of this work is to interrogate how material feminism can expand our understanding of materiality, maturation, and gender—especially girlhood—as represented in narratives for preadolescents and adolescents.

When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region’s existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, this book argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. World War I and Southern Modernism examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. This book also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.