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Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. This book is an introduction to the history and controversies that have shaped comics exhibitions, who the pioneers were, different ideas about comic art exhibits around the world, how the best practices for displaying comics have developed and why, and how artists and curators have found ways to display comics that break away from the “framed pages on the wall” format. Using long out-of-print reviews and new material from experts such as Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, and Andrei Molotiu, Comic Art in Museums maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930’s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows. To borrow a phrase from Theirry Groensteen, it’s the story of one way that comics have finally achieved “cultural legitimization.”

Recent decades have seen a blossoming of academic and scholarly concern with comics. Within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root—assumptions around the particular methods and approaches used to approach the comics form, around the ways we should read comics, how its ‘system’ works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish amidst this verdant landscape of comics studies. These approaches seek to question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. They turn instead to politics, to aesthetics, to law, to critical theory. This collection seeks to grow, and to grow within those more critical directions in comics studies; to fertilize and help sustain them, to multiply them, and continue to cultivate a healthy skepticism, creativity, and openness in the approach to comics knowledge. Accordingly, this volume contains a collection of indicative and provocative essays, accumulated and compiled for readers to explore and make meaning out of: to get lost in, and hopefully find new and enriching directions forward in their encounters with the rich possibilities that comics enable. Traversing phenomenological, existential, material, legal, contextual, political, and revolutionary meanings in their engagements with both comics form and examples of comics work, and interspersed with critical comics interludes, these essays seek to consolidate, exemplify, and open up potential futures for the fecund and amorphous fields of critical comics studies.

This book argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmental thought in three distinct ways. First, they began recognizing as never before the devastating and even apocalyptic effects that humans can have on the environment, particularly in response to the period’s dust storms, flooding, and other human-created ecological disasters. Next, they acknowledged the ecological importance of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests,” as conservationists were beginning to do during the period. And lastly, they laid the groundwork for what we now refer to as “environmental justice” by directly connecting environmental exploitation with racial, economic, and gender inequality. To illustrate the reach of environmental thought during the period, the first three chapters of the book focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wilderness, rural, and urban. The last chapter examines the period’s growing concern over the effects of technology on the human and nonhuman world. Ultimately, The Green Depression illustrates the importance of depression-era literature to the development of the modern environmentalist and environmental justice movements. It also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that identifies the importance of environmental thought to the literature and culture of African Americans and other minority groups as well as in considering urban landscapes and other built environments. Finally, the book seeks to initiate a conversation to consider how experiences and ideas from the period have influenced and can inform responses to the intersections of environmental, social, and economic issues in our own time.

At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. This book considers how writers in works from 19th slave narratives to 21st century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Out of all of slavery’s perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all of the other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, this study reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession. The book thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Instead, gothic tales of slavery are the very distillation of the anxieties about race and property located in the larger American literary tradition.

American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s 11^th novel, God Help the Child, released in 2015, set in contemporary times, explores the relationship between a financially successful, beautiful young Black woman with a haunted past and an intelligent disaffected young Black man who is equally alienated from his past. This collection of essays, edited by Morrison scholars Alice Knox Eaton, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, and Shirley A. Stave, and including essays by well-known Morrison critics Evelyn Schreiber, Mar Gallego, Susana Vega, Anissa Wardi, and Justine Tally, explores the novel’s themes and tropes through a multiplicity of critical and theoretical approaches. The first of the collection’s three sections focuses on the issue of trauma in the novel. The various essays featured here delve into the thorny topic of childhood neglect and sexual abuse, considering how the main characters carry the burden of the pain they experienced into adulthood. These essays probe the healing achieved in the novel through various approaches, all focused on arriving at an understanding of Morrison’s sense of what healthy adulthood entails. The collection’s second section considers Morrison’s narrative choices in her novel, concentrating on the formal experimentation that occurs within the text. The authors in this section reflect upon the myriad ways in which Morrison's novel relies upon intertextual play in the creation of a fictional cosmology that engages the reader on multiple levels. Essays included in the collection's final section turn attention to God Help the Child in terms of the novel's signifying relation with earlier Morrison texts, bringing into sharp focus the predominant concerns throughout Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The BluestEye, until the present.

Flannery O’Connor’s work can be unsettling to read, inviting a wide range of responses because of her peculiar mixture of violence, grace, and humor. However, a few persistent readerly habits have shaped popular and critical understandings of Flannery O’Connor, overly narrowing interpretations of her work. This collection seeks to disrupt those habits, reconsidering a giant of southern literature in a range of ways. The essays featured here begin with new methodologies, including object-oriented ontology and "crip-queer" theory, among others. Some essays in this collection introduce new contexts, like gothic science fiction, by way of approaching O’Connor. Others draw out unlikely comparisons with writers not normally considered alongside O’Connor, including Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath. And in the final section, two essays reevaluate familiar arguments regarding O’Connor’s legacy, both in terms of her legal estate and as a formative figure in the rise of the creative writing workshop. Thus, this volume pursues questions that productively complicate the commonplace assumptions of O’Connor scholarship while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention.