US Graphic Novel

Paul Williams is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. He has previously published three books: Dreaming the Graphic Novel (Rutgers UP, 2020), Paul Gilroy (Routledge, 2012), and Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War (Liverpool UP, 2011), and he co-edited the collection The Rise of the American Comics Artist (UP of Mississippi, 2010) with James Lyons.

In this masterful follow-up to Dreaming the Graphic Novel (2020), Paul Williams illuminates the graphic novel as a form that lives at the borders of various media forms, incorporating aspects of some and rewiring others to create something that is simultaneously new even as it illuminates the media forms of our past.

• List of Illustrations Preface Introduction1. Precursors and Woodcut Novels: 14 September 1842 to the 1930s 2. Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-Century 3. In Search of Adult Comics Readers: 1961–72 4. Declaration of Independents: 1973–9 5. ‘The Comic Book Grows Up’: 1979–91 6. Boom and Bust, Mainstream and Alternative: The 1990s 7. Twenty-First-Century Graphic Novels Conclusion