This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "e;wordless novels"e; of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905-1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group - much like Beethoven's piano sonatas or Keats's great odes - in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward's novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.
| ISBN: | 9781000588019 |
| Publication date: | 30th May 2022 |
| Author: | Scott, Grant F. |
| Publisher: | Taylor and Francis |
| Format: | Ebook (Epub) |