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ENGL 2323- Rhodes

Researching the Annotated Bibliography/ Character Literary Analysis Assisgnments

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Suggested Readings/ Viewings

Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition

The first book-length study to address Moore's significance to the Gothic, this volume is also the first to provide in-depth analyses of his spoken-word performances, poetry and prose, as well as his comics and graphic novels. The essays collected here identify the Gothic tradition as perhaps the most significant cultural context for understanding Moore's work, providing unique insight into its wider social and political dimensions as well as addressing key theoretical issues in Gothic Studies, Comics Studies and Adaptation Studies. Scholars, students and general readers alike will find fresh insights into Moore's use of horror and terror, homage and parody, plus allusion and adaptation. The international list of contributors includes leading researchers in the field and the studies presented here enhance the understanding of Moore's works while at the same time exploring the ways in which these serve to advance a broader appreciation of Gothic aesthetics.

Breaking the Frames

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019 Comics studies has reached a crossroads. Graphic novels have never received more attention and legitimation from scholars, but new canons and new critical discourses have created tensions within a field built on the populist rhetoric of cultural studies. As a result, comics studies has begun to cleave into distinct camps--based primarily in cultural or literary studies--that attempt to dictate the boundaries of the discipline or else resist disciplinarity itself. The consequence is a growing disconnect in the ways that comics scholars talk to each other--or, more frequently, do not talk to each other or even acknowledge each other's work. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies surveys the current state of comics scholarship, interrogating its dominant schools, questioning their mutual estrangement, and challenging their propensity to champion the comics they study. Marc Singer advocates for greater disciplinary diversity and methodological rigor in comics studies, making the case for a field that can embrace more critical and oppositional perspectives. Working through extended readings of some of the most acclaimed comics creators--including Marjane Satrapi, Alan Moore, Kyle Baker, and Chris Ware--Singer demonstrates how comics studies can break out of the celebratory frameworks and restrictive canons that currently define the field to produce new scholarship that expands our understanding of comics and their critics.

The British Comic Book Invasion

What makes a successful comics creator? How can storytelling stay exciting and innovative? How can genres be kept vital?  Writers and artists in the highly competitive U.S. comics mainstream have always had to explore these questions but they were especially pressing in the 1980s. As comics readers grew older they started calling for more sophisticated stories. They were also no longer just following the adventures of popular characters--writers and artists with distinctive styles were in demand. DC Comics and Marvel went looking for such mavericks and found them in the United Kingdom. Creators like Alan Moore (Watchmen, Saga of the Swamp Thing), Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo) and Garth Ennis (Preacher) migrated from the anarchical British comics industry to the U.S. mainstream and shook up the status quo yet came to rely on the genius of the American system.

Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History, Theme, and Technique, Second Edition

The Second Edition of Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History, Theme & Technique contains over 80 essays covering themes and concepts of graphic novels. It includes genres, time periods, foreign language traditions, social relevance, and craftsmanship such as penciling and inking.

Critical Survey of Graphic Novels - Independent and Underground Classics

Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Independent and Underground Classics, Second Edition offers 225 essays covering graphic novels and core comics series, focusing on the independents and underground genre that form today's canon for academic coursework and library collections.

Graphic History

When it comes to recounting history, issues arise as to whose stories are told and how reliable is the telling. This collection of fourteen essays explores the unique ways in which graphic novels can aid us in addressing those issues while shedding new light on a variety of texts, including those by canonical North American and European writers Art Spiegelman (Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers), Alan Moore (From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Return...

Presentations of the 2010 Upstate Steampunk Extravaganza and Meetup

In November 2010, a small but growing group of Victorian Alternate Historians, often referred to as Steampunk, met for the first conference of its kind. There was music, fashion, merchants, and all the other trappings of the Victorian time period set in a venue of OC what if.OCO What set this conference apart was the academic nature of the presentations. Utilizing the internet and scholarly publications, a call for papers was sent out and the response was impressive. Faculty, graduate students, s..."

Reading Comics

Suddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and images of the rest of contemporary culture. InReading Comics, critic Douglas Wolk shows us why this is and how it came to be. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics-from Alan Moore to Alison Bechdel to Dave Sim to Chris Ware-and introduces a critical theory that explains where each fits into the pantheon of art.Reading Comics is accessible to the hardcore fan and the curious newcomer; it is the first book for people who want to know not just what comics are worth reading, but also the ways to think and talk and argue about them.

The Rise of the American Comics Artist

Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic-book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) revolutionized the former genre in particular. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention beyond comics-specific outlets, as best represented by Art Spiegelman's Maus. Publishers began to collect, bind, and market comics as ""graphic novels,"" and these appeared in mainstream bookstores and in magazine reviews.The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts brings together new scholarship surveying the production, distribution and reception of American comics from this pivotal decade to the present. The collection specifically explores the figure of the comics creator--either as writer, as artist, or as writer and artist--in contemporary U.S. comics, using creators as focal points to evaluate changes to the industry, its aesthetics, and its critical reception. The book also includes essays on landmark creators such as Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, as well as insightful interviews with Jeff Smith (Bone), Jim Woodring (Frank) and Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics). As comics have reached new audiences, through different material and electronic forms, the public's broad perception of what comics are has changed. The Rise of the American Comics Artist surveys the ways in which the figure of the creator has been at the heart of these evolutions.

Serials to Graphic Novels

"A valuable and comprehensive survey of an enormous subject."--Paul Goldman, author of Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room"A marvelous overview of how and why illustrations became an integral part of Victorian fiction. Golden documents a remarkable continuity from early nineteenth-century caricatures to realistic portrait-based illustrations to current graphic rewritings of familiar classics."--Martha Vicinus, author of Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928"A capacious and synthetic work that draws on a wide variety of scholarship, a very impressive command of the history of book illustration, a huge array of visual and verbal texts, and (most important) a commitment to the genre as a genre in the history of literary and artistic form."--Peter Betjemann, author of Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the nineteenth century. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant form and surveys the fluidity in styles of illustration in serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children's literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Golden examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Rabbit, and finds new expressions of this traditional genre in present-day graphic novel adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She explores the various factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book--the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies--and how these ultimately created a mass market for new fiction. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the Household Edition of Dickens or the realist artists of the "Sixties," notably Fred Barnard and John Tenniel, this volume examines the lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. It also discusses how a particular canon has been refashioned and repurposed for new generations of readers. Catherine J. Golden, professor of English at Skidmore College, is author of several books, including Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III): Century

For the first time in paperback- the New York Times bestselling "Century" trilogy sees our famous fraternity of meta-fictional marauders romping across the modern age, blending countless strands of British culture into a thrilling tapestry. The nineteenth century, expiring with a flourish of Moriarty and Martians, has left the division of Military Intelligence commanded by Mina Murray in a state of disrepair. While she and her lover Allan Quatermain have achieved a measure of eternal youth, recruiting new talents such as the trans-gendered immortal Orlando, the ghost-finder Thomas Carnacki and the gentleman thief A.J. Raffles to replace their deceased or missing colleagues, former associate Captain Nemo has retired to his Pacific pirate island to decline in surly isolation. Now it is the early years of a new and unfamiliar century, and forces are emerging that appear to promise ruin for the Murray group, the nation and indeed the world, even were it to take a hundred years for this apocalyptic threat to come to its disastrous fruition. From the occult parlours and crime-haunted wharfs of 1910, through the criminal, mystical and psychedelic underworlds of 1969 to the financially and culturally desolated streets of 2009, the disintegrating remnants of Miss Murray and her League must combat not only the hidden hand of their undying adversary, but also the ethical and psychological collapse accompanying this new era. And a lot of things can happen in a CENTURY.

Illuminations

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE From New York Times bestselling author Alan Moore-one of the most influential writers in the history of comics-"a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving" (Neil Gaiman) which takes us to the fantastical underside of reality. In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover--and in some cases even make and unmake--the various uncharted parts of existence. In "A Hypothetical Lizard," two concubines in a brothel of fantastical specialists fall in love with tragic ramifications. In "Not Even Legend," a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In "Illuminations," a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella "What We Can Know About Thunderman," which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry's major players over the last seventy-five years, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that--a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.