Research Catalog

Title

The origins of comics : from William Hogarth to Winsor McCay / Thierry Smolderen ; translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.

Author

Smolderen, Thierry.

Publication

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2014]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Beaty, Bart
• Nguyen, Nick,

Description

vi, 168 pages : illustrations; 32 cm

Summary

"In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form"--

Uniform Title

• Naissances de la bande dessinée. English
• Project Muse UPCC books

Alternative Title

Naissances de la bande dessinée.

Subjects

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture
• LITERARY CRITICISM / Comics & Graphic Novels
• Comic books, strips, etc > History and criticism
• ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Note

• Translation of: Naissances de la bande dessinée.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 162-164) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

William Hogarth: Readable Images -- Graffiti and Little Doodle Men -- The Arabesque Novels of Rodolphe Töpffer -- "Go, Little Book!" -- The Evolution of the Press -- A. B. Frost and the Photographic Revolution -- From the Label to the Balloon -- Winsor McCay: The Last Baroque.

ISBN

• 9781617031496 (hardback : alk. paper)
• 1617031496 (hardback : alk. paper)
• 9781617039096 (ebook) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2013024100

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library