Content area
Full Text
Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, eds, From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2013). 416 pp. ISBN: 978-3-11-028181-1 (hardback, euro99.95, $140.00)
From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels is the thirty-seventh instalment in German publisher De Gruyter's Narratologia series, and the first to be wholly dedicated to comics and graphic novels. The book comprises sixteen essays by an internationally distributed selection of authors, along with an introduction by editors Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. The articles are broken down into four sections: 'Graphic Narrative and Narratological Concepts'; 'Graphic Narrative Beyond the "Single Work"'; 'Genre and Format Histories of Graphic Narrative'; and 'Graphic Narrative across Cultures'. In their introduction, Stein and Thon establish both the context and the aims of the book thus:
[A]s Jared Gardner and David Herman write in their introduction to a recent special issue of SubStance, we can detect 'emerging connections between comics studies and narrative theory' that may eventually converge into a 'new, hybridized field of study'. . . . Gardner and Herman christen this field-to-be 'graphic narrative theory', and the aim of the present volume is to explore new ways of thinking about the narrativity of comics from this theoretically as well as methodologically refined vantage point. (2)
Importantly, the book's aim is emphatically not to grapple solely with the narrativity of comics or of graphic novels in their limited forms, but to deal with graphic narrative, a term that the editors describe as 'much more inclusive', being 'capable of encompassing different forms, formats, genres and storytelling traditions across cultures and from around the world' (5). A second stated aim is to follow Gardner and Herman in striving towards a medium-specific narratology of these graphic narratives, rather than falling into the '"alliances . . . with fields such as autobiography studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies etc."', which have in some cases 'endorsed a medially unspecific and narratologically questionable literary approach to graphic narrative' (3).
The first of these aims, the consideration of graphic narrative, is achieved extremely effectively within the book. Rather than ignoring the more restrictive forms of comics and graphic narratives, some of the best essays in the volume look in detail at the distinctions...