Marc Singer – författare

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

How science fiction and literary fiction merge to represent today's social, political, and environmental concernsThe future is now. Decades of accelerating technological, social, and environmental change have created a sense in the literary world that science fiction, rather than an augury of the future, may actually be the genre best equipped to describe the present.Strange Hybrids examines the various ways contemporary novelists have adapted the structures and conventions of science fiction into literary depictions of our own world. Combining elements of both realism and speculative fiction, novelists such as Francis Spufford, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead represent societies gripped by social, political, and ecological instability. Taking up questions of information science, climate change, medicine, economics, and more, their novels bridge the concerns of the sciences and the humanities to depict existing realities and imagine alternative ones. As descriptive as they are speculative, these novels demonstrate that science fiction offers an essential vocabulary for rethinking literature and its relationship to the contemporary world.

How science fiction and literary fiction merge to represent today's social, political, and environmental concernsThe future is now. Decades of accelerating technological, social, and environmental change have created a sense in the literary world that science fiction, rather than an augury of the future, may actually be the genre best equipped to describe the present.Strange Hybrids examines the various ways contemporary novelists have adapted the structures and conventions of science fiction into literary depictions of our own world. Combining elements of both realism and speculative fiction, novelists such as Francis Spufford, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead represent societies gripped by social, political, and ecological instability. Taking up questions of information science, climate change, medicine, economics, and more, their novels bridge the concerns of the sciences and the humanities to depict existing realities and imagine alternative ones. As descriptive as they are speculative, these novels demonstrate that science fiction offers an essential vocabulary for rethinking literature and its relationship to the contemporary world.

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019Comics studies has reached a crossroads. Graphic novels have never received more attention and legitimation from scholars, but new canons and new critical discourses have created tensions within a field built on the populist rhetoric of cultural studies. As a result, comics studies has begun to cleave into distinct camps-based primarily in cultural or literary studies-that attempt to dictate the boundaries of the discipline or else resist disciplinarity itself. The consequence is a growing disconnect in the ways that comics scholars talk to each other-or, more frequently, do not talk to each other or even acknowledge each other’s work.Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies surveys the current state of comics scholarship, interrogating its dominant schools, questioning their mutual estrangement, and challenging their propensity to champion the comics they study. Marc Singer advocates for greater disciplinary diversity and methodological rigor in comics studies, making the case for a field that can embrace more critical and oppositional perspectives. Working through extended readings of some of the most acclaimed comics creators-including Marjane Satrapi, Alan Moore, Kyle Baker, and Chris Ware-Singer demonstrates how comics studies can break out of the celebratory frameworks and restrictive canons that currently define the field to produce new scholarship that expands our understanding of comics and their critics.

One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison (b. 1960) brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres-superhero, science fiction, and fantasy-that dominate the American and British comics industries. His comics range from bestsellers featuring the most universally recognized superhero franchises (All-Star Superman, New X-Men, Batman) to more independent, creator-owned work (The Invisibles, The Filth, We3) that defies any generic classification.In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, author Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in the major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time. His comics blur the boundaries between fantasy and realism, mixing autobiographical representation and cultural critique with heroic adventure. They offer self-reflexive appraisals of their own genres while they experiment with the formal elements of comics. Perhaps most ambitiously, they challenge contemporary theories of language and meaning, seeking to develop new modes of expression grounded in comics' capacity for visual narrative and the fantasy genres' ability to make figurative meanings literal.