Lynd Ward: Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo (LOA #211)

Lynd Ward: Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo (LOA #211) PDF Author: Lynd Ward
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598533991
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The second volume of collected woodcut graphic novels from a “brilliant and iconoclastic” author who has been compared to Frank Capra and John Steinbeck (Jonathan Lethem, New York Times–bestselling author of The Fortress of Solitude) In this, the second of two volumes collecting all his woodcut novels, The Library of America brings together Lynd Ward’s three later books, two of them brief, the visual equivalent of chamber music, the other his longest, a symphony in three movements. Prelude to a Million Years (1933) is a dark meditation on art, inspiration, and the disparity between the ideal and the real. Song Without Words (1936), a protest against the rise of European fascism, asks if ours is a world still fit for the human soul. Vertigo (1937), Ward’s undisputed masterpiece, is an epic novel on the theme of the individual caught in the downward spiral of a sinking American economy. Its characters include a young violinist, her luckless fiancé, and an elderly business magnate who—movingly, and without ever becoming a political caricature—embodies the social forces determining their fate. The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. Ward’s novels are presented, for the first time since the 1930s, in the format that the artist intended, one image per right-hand page, and are followed by four essays in which he discusses the technical challenges of his craft. Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, “Reading Pictures,” that defines Ward’s towering achievement in that most demanding of graphic-story forms, the wordless novel in woodcuts.

Lynd Ward: Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo (LOA #211)

Lynd Ward: Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo (LOA #211) PDF Author: Lynd Ward
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598533991
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The second volume of collected woodcut graphic novels from a “brilliant and iconoclastic” author who has been compared to Frank Capra and John Steinbeck (Jonathan Lethem, New York Times–bestselling author of The Fortress of Solitude) In this, the second of two volumes collecting all his woodcut novels, The Library of America brings together Lynd Ward’s three later books, two of them brief, the visual equivalent of chamber music, the other his longest, a symphony in three movements. Prelude to a Million Years (1933) is a dark meditation on art, inspiration, and the disparity between the ideal and the real. Song Without Words (1936), a protest against the rise of European fascism, asks if ours is a world still fit for the human soul. Vertigo (1937), Ward’s undisputed masterpiece, is an epic novel on the theme of the individual caught in the downward spiral of a sinking American economy. Its characters include a young violinist, her luckless fiancé, and an elderly business magnate who—movingly, and without ever becoming a political caricature—embodies the social forces determining their fate. The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. Ward’s novels are presented, for the first time since the 1930s, in the format that the artist intended, one image per right-hand page, and are followed by four essays in which he discusses the technical challenges of his craft. Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, “Reading Pictures,” that defines Ward’s towering achievement in that most demanding of graphic-story forms, the wordless novel in woodcuts.

Prelude to a Million Years & Song Without Words

Prelude to a Million Years & Song Without Words PDF Author: Lynd Ward
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486472698
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
One of the twentieth century's finest engravers, Lynd Ward created remarkable woodcuts that resonate in both the heart and the imagination. His dramatic images present complete, self-contained narratives in both of these wordless tales. Prelude to a Million Years unfolds against the backdrop of the Great Depression, portraying in thirty illustrations a sculptor's struggles in an industrial society. Song Without Words explores one woman's emotional journey through pregnancy and childbirth in a series of twenty-one images described by the author as "a kind of prose poem." Ward's memorable works have been honored with such prestigious awards as the Library of Congress Award, the National Academy of Design Print Award, the New York Times Best Illustrated Award, the Caldecott Medal, and the Regina Award. An introduction by woodcut historian David A. Beronä places these stories within the context of Ward's career and the graphic arts world of the 1930s.

Frontiers in American Children’s Literature

Frontiers in American Children’s Literature PDF Author: Dorothy Clark
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144388958X
Category : Children's literature, American
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Frontiers in American Children’s Literature is a groundbreaking work by both established and emerging scholars in the fields of children’s literature criticism, history, and education. It offers 18 essays which explore and critically examine the expanding canon of American children’s books against the backdrop of a social history comprised of a deep layering of trauma and struggle, redefining what equality and freedom mean. The book charts new ground in how children’s literature is telling stories of historical trauma – the racial violence of American slavery, the Mexican Repatriation Act, and the oppression and violence against African Americans in light of such murders as in the AME Mother Emanuel Church and the shooting of Michael Brown. This new frontier explores how truth telling about racism, oppression, and genocide communicates with the young about violence and freedom in literature, transforming harsh truths into a moral vision. Frontiers in American Children’s Literature will be an instant classic for fans of children’s and adolescent literature, American literature, cultural studies, and students of literature in general, as well as teachers and prospective teachers. Those interested in art history, graphic novels, picture book art, African American and American Indian literature, the digital humanities, and new media will also find this volume compelling. Authors and artists covered in these essays include Laurie Halse Anderson, M.T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Louise Erdrich, Eric Gansworth, Edward Gorey, Russell Hoban, Ellen Hopkins, Patricia Polacco, Ann Rinaldi, Peter Sís, Lynd Ward, and Naomi Wolf, among others. Essayists examine their subjects’ most provocative works on the topics of realistic depictions of slavery, oppression, and trauma, and the triumph of truth in storytelling over these experiences. From The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing to The Birchbark House, from the graphic novel to picture books and the digital humanities in teaching and reading, there is something for everyone in this collection. Contributors include leaders in the fields of literature and education, such as the award-winning Katherine Capshaw and Anastasia Ulanowicz. Margaret Noodin, poet and leader in American Indian scholarship and education, leads the essays on American Indian children’s literature, while Steven Herb, Director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and an affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, offers an insider’s view of Caldecott Medal awardee Lynn Ward.

Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937

Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937 PDF Author: Grant F. Scott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000588017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" 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.

Artful Breakdowns

Artful Breakdowns PDF Author: Georgiana Banita
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496837541
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beineke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent Worcester A carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman’s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman’s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem “The Wild Party,” and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children’s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman’s career to document continuities and ruptures that the intense focus on Maus has obscured, yielding an array of original readings. Spiegelman’s predilection for collage, improvisation, and the potent protest of silence shows his allegiance to modernist art. His cultural critique and anticapitalist, antimilitary positions shed light on his vocal public persona, while his deft intertextual strategies of mixing media archives, from comics to photography and film, amplify the poignance of his works. Developing new approaches to Spiegelman’s comics—such as the publication history of Maus, the history of immigration and xenophobia, and the cartoonist’s elevation of children’s comics—the collection leaves no doubt that despite the accolades his accessible comics have garnered, we have yet to grasp the full range of Spiegelman’s achievements in the realm of comics and beyond.

Wonderfully Wordless

Wonderfully Wordless PDF Author: William Patrick Martin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442254785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Wonderfully Wordless: The 500 Most Recommended Graphic Novels and Picture Books is the first comprehensive best book guide to wordless picture books (and nearly wordless picture books). It is an indispensable resource for parents and teachers who love graphic storytelling or who recognize the value of these exceptional books in working with different types of students, particularly preschool, English as a Second Language (ESL), and special needs, and creative writers. Every age group will benefit from Wonderfully Wordless, from babies and toddlers encountering their first books, to elementary age children captivated by the popular fantasy and adventure themes, to teenagers attracted to graphic novels because of their more intense content and comic book format. Even adults who are not yet readers will benefit from this uniquely authoritative resource because it will provide a bridge to literacy and give them books that they can immediately share with their children. Wonderfully Wordless is the ultimate guide to wordless and almost wordless books. Its 500 exemplary titles are a composite of 140 sources including recommendations from reference books, award lists, book reviews, professional journals, literary blogs, and the collections of many of the most prominent libraries in the United States and the English-speaking world. The US libraries include the Boston Public Library, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Denver Library, New York Public Library, and Seattle Public Library, as well as the academic libraries at Bank Street College, Miami University, Michigan State University, Penn State University, Stanford University, and University of Chicago. The international libraries include the University of Oxford, British Council Library India, British Library, Hong Kong Public Libraries, National Library of the Philippines, Toronto Public Library, Trinity College Library (Dublin), Vancouver Public Library, and the National Library of New Zealand. The 500 books included here are generated from a database with 7,300 booklist entries. In essence, the ranked list emerging from this compilation will constitute “votes” for the most popular titles, the ones most experts agree are the best. By pooling the expertise from the US and other English-speaking countries, Wonderfully Wordless is an unrivaled core list of classic and contemporary titles. This authoritative reference book conveys not the opinion of one expert, but the combined opinions of a legion of experts. If a single picture is worth a thousand words, then a multitude of the picture-only texts is worth a compendium. Wonderfully Wordless is organized by theme and format and readers should have no problem zeroing in on their favorite topics. There are thirty-one chapters organized by topics such as Christmas Cheer, Character Values, Comedy Capers, Pet Mischief, Creative Journeys, Fascinating Fantasies, and Marvelous Mysteries. There is a full spectrum of wordless fiction and nonfiction, concept books, visual puzzles, board books, cloth books, woodcut novels, graphic novels, and more.

An American Art Colony

An American Art Colony PDF Author: Paul H. Mattingly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683931955
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
An American Art Colony demonstrates the social dimension of American art in the twentieth century, paying special attention to the role of fellow artists, nonartists and the historical context of art production. This book treats the art colony not as a static addendum to an artist’s profile but rather as an essential ingredient in artistic life. The art colony here becomes a historical entity that changes over time and influences the kind of art that ensues. It is a special methodology of the study that collective features of three generation of artists help clarify how artists engage their audiences. Since many of these artists worked within the cultural confines of metropolitan New York and its magazine industry, they cultivated subjects that were recognizable by ordinary citizens. Early on, they drew from the emergent suburban life of their neighbors for their artistic themes. Gradually these contexts become more formally institutionalized and their subjects gravitated away from themes of ordinary life to themes more exotic, expressionistic and fanciful. A key methodology for this study consisted of an analysis of collective biographies of 170 participating artists. The theme of modern art explains here how abstraction was suborned to public images, widening the very meaning of the term modern.

Lynd Ward: Gods' Man, Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage (LOA #210)

Lynd Ward: Gods' Man, Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage (LOA #210) PDF Author: Lynd Ward
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598533967
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
Edited by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus A wordless novel in woodcuts from Lynd Ward, a pioneering artist/novelist who was “an unmistakable soul-companion to . . . Frank Capra and John Steinbeck, but also Fritz Lang and Franz Kafka” (Jonathan Lethem) From the Great Depression to WII, America’s first great graphic novelist bore witness to the roiling, dizzying national scene as both a master printmaker and a socially committed storyteller. In this, the first of two volumes collecting all his woodcut novels, The Library of America brings together Lynd Ward’s earliest books, published when the artist was still in his twenties. Gods’ Man (1929), the audaciously ambitious work that made Ward’s reputation, is a modern morality play, an allegory of the deadly bargain a striving young artist often makes with life. Madman’s Drum (1930), a multigenerational saga worthy of Faulkner, traces the legacy of violence haunting a family whose stock in trade is human souls. Wild Pilgrimage (1932), perhaps the most accomplished of these early books, is a study in the brutalization of an American factory worker whose heart can still respond to beauty but whose mind is twisted in rage against the system and its shackles. The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. Ward’s novels are presented, for the first time since the 1930s, in the format that the artist intended, one image per right-hand page, and are followed by five essays in which he discusses the technical challenges of his craft. Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, “Reading Pictures,” that defines Ward’s towering achievement in that most demanding of graphic-story forms.

Contemporary World Fiction

Contemporary World Fiction PDF Author: Juris Dilevko
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1598849093
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
This much-needed guide to translated literature offers readers the opportunity to hear from, learn about, and perhaps better understand our shrinking world from the perspective of insiders from many cultures and traditions. In a globalized world, knowledge about non-North American societies and cultures is a must. Contemporary World Fiction: A Guide to Literature in Translation provides an overview of the tremendous range and scope of translated world fiction available in English. In so doing, it will help readers get a sense of the vast world beyond North America that is conveyed by fiction titles from dozens of countries and language traditions. Within the guide, approximately 1,000 contemporary non-English-language fiction titles are fully annotated and thousands of others are listed. Organization is primarily by language, as language often reflects cultural cohesion better than national borders or geographies, but also by country and culture. In addition to contemporary titles, each chapter features a brief overview of earlier translated fiction from the group. The guide also provides in-depth bibliographic essays for each chapter that will enable librarians and library users to further explore the literature of numerous languages and cultural traditions.

Panel to the Screen

Panel to the Screen PDF Author: Drew Morton
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496809793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Over the past forty years, American film has entered into a formal interaction with the comic book. Such comic book adaptations as Sin City, 300, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World have adopted components of their source materials' visual style. The screen has been fractured into panels, the photographic has given way to the graphic, and the steady rhythm of cinematic time has evolved into a far more malleable element. In other words, films have begun to look like comics. Yet, this interplay also occurs in the other direction. In order to retain cultural relevancy, comic books have begun to look like films. Frank Miller's original Sin City comics are indebted to film noir while Stephen King's The Dark Tower series could be a Sergio Leone spaghetti western translated onto paper. Film and comic books continuously lean on one another to reimagine their formal attributes and stylistic possibilities. In Panel to the Screen, Drew Morton examines this dialogue in its intersecting and rapidly changing cultural, technological, and industrial contexts. Early on, many questioned the prospect of a "low" art form suited for children translating into “high” art material capable of drawing colossal box office takes. Now the naysayers are as quiet as the queued crowds at Comic-Cons are massive. Morton provides a nuanced account of this phenomenon by using formal analysis of the texts in a real-world context of studio budgets, grosses, and audience reception.