Overview

The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. Using key examples, this volume reviews the historical development of various subgenres within the graphic novel tradition and examines how graphic novelists have created multiple and different accounts of the American experience, including that of African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities. Reading the American graphic novel opens a debate on how major works have changed the idea of America from that once found in the quintessential action or superhero comics to show new, different, intimate accounts of historical change as well as social and individual, personal experience. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.

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9781009379359

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Jan Baetens is Professor Emeritus of cultural studies at the University of Leuven. His work focuses on the theory and practice of contemporary French poetry, cultural theory, and visual narrative in popular print genres. Some of his recent publications include The Graphic Novel (2014, coauthored with Hugo Frey), Novelization: From Film to Novel (2018), The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (2018, coedited with Hugo Frey and Stephen E. Tabachnick). Hugo Frey is Professor of Visual and Cultural History at University of Chichester UK. With Jan Baetens he has published The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (2014) and with Baetens and Stephen Tabachnik coedited The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (2018). He has written extensively on French cinema (Nationalism and the Cinema in France, 2014) and the director Louis Malle. He has conducted research for the British Council and in 2022 was a Visiting Professor at the University of Ghent. Fabrice Leroy is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has published numerous book chapters on French and Belgian Francophone literature and graphic novels, as well as articles in leading scholarly journals. His most recent monographs devoted to comics are Sfar So Far. Identity, History, Fantasy, and Mimesis in Joann Sfar's Graphic Novels (2014), and Pierre La Police: Une estheìtique de la malfaçon (with Livio Belloï, 2019).

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