Overview

This is the first book to place the autobiographical projects of canonical comics authors Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes-boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs-through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Built around rich close readings, it shows what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities. Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist practice, the book traces how contemporary graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form, situating the medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now.

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9781009548830

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Author Information

Emmy Waldman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she works in contemporary graphic narrative and Jewish American literature. Formerly, she was a visiting assistant professor of modern and contemporary literature at Virginia Tech. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Harvard, with a focus in graphic narrative and comics. Her research and writing appear in Twentieth Century Literature, Post45, New Literary History, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, among others.

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