What if fairy-tale characters lived in New York City? What if a superhero knew he was a fictional character? What if you could dispense your own justice with one hundred untraceable bullets? These are the questions asked and answered in the course of the challenging storytelling in Fables, Tom Strong, and 100 Bullets, the three twenty-first-century comics series that Karin Kukkonen considers in depth in her exploration of how and why the storytelling in comics is more than merely entertaining. Applying a cognitive approach to reading comics in all their narrative richness and intricacy, Contemporary Comics Storytelling opens an intriguing perspective on how these works engage the legacy of postmodernism--its subversion, self-reflexivity, and moral contingency. Its three case studies trace how contemporary comics tie into deep traditions of visual and verbal storytelling, how they reevaluate their own status as fiction, and how the fictional minds of their characters generate complex ethical thought experiments. At a time when the medium is taken more and more seriously as intricate and compelling literary art, this book lays the groundwork for an analysis of the ways in which comics challenge and engage readers' minds. It brings together comics studies with narratology and literary criticism and, in so doing, provides a new set of tools for evaluating the graphic novel as an emergent literary form.

Steen Ledet Christiansen's Storytelling in "Kabuki" explores the series created by David Mack--a slow, recursive narrative that focuses on the death of Kabuki and her past. The series ran from 1994 to 2004 in a variety of miniseries, one-shots, and spin-offs, rather than following a conventional American monthly release schedule. Most of the series explores different perspectives on the same event and adds background to Kabuki's past, usually through surreal sequences, dreams, and near-death experiences. The flexibility of comics' approach to chronology, space, focalization, narrative, and fictionality enabled Mack to produce an unusual experience. Kabuki tells a story that can only exist via comics. Christiansen analyzes the visual design of the series, a heterogeneous collection of styles depending on the story. To understand Kabuki, it is crucial to explore the visual styles, as well as the use of visual and spatial rhymes and mixed media forms. Because Kabuki employs a complex layering of focalizations, diegetic levels, and metafictional self-reflectivity that is rare in mainstream American comics, it utilizes a narrative poetics that focuses on constant repeating, restating, and returning to the same events. Kabuki's unique compositional layering allows Christiansen to provide a clear example of how comics work while also expanding on critical vocabulary, especially in terms of spatial poetics. By exploring spatial form, Christiansen illuminates and gives a critical framework to a different and underexamined aspect of comics.

It has become something of a cliché within the field of narratology to assert the commercial, aesthetic, and sociocultural relevance of narrative representations, but the fact remains that narratives are everywhere. Whenever we read a novel or a comic, watch a film or an episode of our favorite television series, or play the latest video game, we are likely to engage with narrative media. Similarly, the intermedial adaptations and transmedial entertainment franchises that have become increasingly visible during the past few decades are, at their core, narrative forms. Since a significant part of contemporary media culture is defined by the narratives we tell each other via various media, the media studies discipline needs a genuinely transmedial narratology. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture focuses on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation. It provides not only a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and video games but also a theoretical frame within which medium-specific approaches from literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of media and cultural studies may be employed to further our understanding of narratives across media. Jan-Noël Thon is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He is the coeditor of a number of books on narrative and media studies, including From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative and Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Nebraska, 2014).

Comic books for adults have become one of the most novel and colourful forms of cultural expression in the Arab world today. During the last ten years, young Arabs have crafted stories explaining issues such as authoritarianism, resistance, war, sex, gender relations and youth culture. These are distributed through informal channels as well as independent bookstores and websites. Events like the annual Cairocomix festival in Egypt and the Mahmoud Kahil Award in Lebanon evidence the importance of this cultural phenomenon. Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture focuses on the production of these comics in Egypt and Lebanon, countries at the forefront of the development of the genre for adults. Jacob Hoigilt guides the reader through the emergence of independent comics, explores their social and political critique, and analyses their visual and verbal rhetoric. Analysing more than 50 illustrations, included here, he shows that Arab comics are revealing of the changing attitudes towards politics, social relations and even language. While political analysts often paint a bleak picture of the Arab world after 2011, this book suggests that art and storytelling continue to nourish a spirit of liberty and freedom despite political setbacks. Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture provides a fresh and original insight into the politics of the Middle East and cultural expression in the Arab World.

In The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, today’s leading comics scholars turn back a page to reveal the founding figures dedicated to understanding comics art. Edited by comics scholars Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, this collection provides an in-depth study of the individuals and institutions that have created and shaped the field of Comics Studies over the past 75 years. From Coulton Waugh to Wolfgang Fuchs, these influential historians, educators, and theorists produced the foundational work and built the institutions that inspired the recent surge in scholarly work in this dynamic, interdisciplinary field. Sometimes scorned, often underappreciated, these visionaries established a path followed by subsequent generations of scholars in literary studies, communication, art history, the social sciences, and more. Giving not only credit where credit is due, this volume both offers an authoritative account of the history of Comics Studies and also helps move the field forward by being a valuable resource for creating graduate student reading lists and the first stop for anyone writing a comics-related literature review.

By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tradition. This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures that has hitherto been overlooked. This research monograph is, then, not an application of narratology in the medium and art of comics, but a revision of narratological concepts and approaches through the study of narrative comics. Thus, while narratology is brought to bear on comics, equally comics are brought to bear on narratology.

This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. Its contributions test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the ‘single work’, consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology. This is the revised second edition of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, which was originally published in the Narratologia series.

Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Maaheen Ahmed examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader—or listener or viewer, as the case may be—is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than closed works, methods by which comics generate or limit meaning as well as increase and structure the scope of reading into a work. Ahmed analyzes a diverse group of British, American, and European (Franco-Belgian, German, Finnish) comics. She treats examples from the key genre categories of fictionalized memoirs and biographies, adventure and superhero, noir, black comedy and crime, science fiction and fantasy. Her analyses demonstrate the ways in which comics generate openness by concentrating on the gaps essential to the very medium of comics, the range of meaning ensconced within words and images as well as their interaction with each other. The analyzed comics, extending from famous to lesser known works, include Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy, Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches, Hugo Pratt's The Ballad of the Salty Sea, Edmond Baudoin's The Voyage, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Moebius's Arzach, Yslaire's Cloud 99 series, and Jarmo Mäkilä's Taxi Ride to Van Gogh's Ear.

The idea of storytelling goes beyond the borders of language, culture, or traditional education, and has historically been a tie that bonds families, communities, and nations. Digital storytelling offers opportunities for authentic academic and non-academic literacy learning across a multitude of genres. It is easily accessible to most members of society and has the potential to transform the boundaries of traditional education. As concepts around traditional literacy education evolve and become more culturally and linguistically relevant and responsive, the connections between digital storytelling and disciplinary literacy warrant considered exploration. Connecting Disciplinary Literacy and Digital Storytelling in K-12 Education develops a conceptual framework around pedagogical connections to digital storytelling within K-12 disciplinary literacy practices. This essential reference book supports student success through the integration of digital storytelling across content areas and grade levels. Covering topics that include immersive storytelling, multiliteracies, social justice, and pedagogical storytelling, it is intended for stakeholders interested in innovative K-12 disciplinary literacy skill development, research, and practices including but not limited to curriculum directors, education faculty, educational researchers, instructional facilitators, literacy professionals, teachers, pre-service teachers, professional development coordinators, teacher preparation programs, and students.

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience and cover core issues that include: historical perspectives centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism the elements of stylistic analysis that include the linguistic levels of foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech acts, speech and thought presentation and point of view current areas of ‘hot topic’ research, such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics and feminist/critical stylistics emerging and future trends including the stylistics of multimodality, creative writing, hypertext fiction and neuroscience Each of the thirty-two chapters provides: an introduction to the subject; an overview of the history of the topic; an analysis of the main current and critical issues; a section with recommendations for practice, and a discussion of possible future trajectory of the subject. This handbook includes chapters written by some of the leading stylistics scholars in the world today, including Jean Boase-Beier, Joe Bray, Michael Burke, Beatrix Busse, Ronald Carter, Billy Clark, Barbara Dancygier, Catherine Emmott, Charles Forceville, Margaret Freeman, Christiana Gregoriou, Geoff Hall, Patrick Colm Hogan, Lesley Jeffries, Marina Lambrou, Michaela Mahlberg, Rocio Montoro, Nina Nørgaard, Dan Shen, Michael Toolan and Sonia Zyngier. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.