Fun Home

This volume in the Routledge Key Guides series provides a round-up of the fifty musicals whose creations were seminal in altering the landscape of musical theater discourse in the English-speaking world. Each entry summarises a show, including a full synopsis, discussion of the creators' process, show's critical reception, and its impact on the landscape of musical theater. This is the ideal primer for students of musical theater – its performance, history, and place in the modern theatrical world – as well as fans and lovers of musicals.

Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David Beauchard’s Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese. These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate the new horizons that illustrated autobiographical narrative creates. The volume insightfully highlights the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and life stories into their work. The result is a challenging and innovative collection that reveals the combined power of autobiography and the graphic novel.

This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” (2009), the role of mediation and remediation in the dynamics of cultural memory (Astrid Erll, 2012; Aleida Assman, 2011), and Stef Craps’ focus on “postcolonial witnessing” and its cross-cultural dimension (2013). The corpus of post-traumatic narratives under discussion includes fiction, diaries, memoirs, films, visual narratives, and oral testimonies. A complicated dialogue between various and sometimes conflicting narratives is thus generated and examined along four main lines in this volume: trauma in the context of “multidirectional memory”; the representation of trauma in autobiographical texts; the dynamic of public forms of national commemoration; and the problematic instantiation of 9/11 as a traumatic landmark.

Whether one describes them as sequential art, graphic narratives or graphic novels, comics have become a vital part of contemporary culture. Their range of expression contains a tremendous variety of forms, genres and modes − from high to low, from serial entertainment for children to complex works of art. This has led to a growing interest in comics as a field of scholarly analysis, as comics studies has established itself as a major branch of criticism. This handbook combines a systematic survey of theories and concepts developed in the field alongside an overview of the most important contexts and themes and a wealth of close readings of seminal works and authors. It will prove to be an indispensable handbook for a large readership, ranging from researchers and instructors to students and anyone else with a general interest in this fascinating medium.

The first book of its kind, Doubly Erased is a comprehensive study of the rich tradition of LGBTQ themes and characters in Appalachian novels, memoirs, poetry, drama, and film. Appalachia has long been seen as homogenous and tradition-bound. Allison E. Carey helps to remedy this misunderstanding, arguing that it has led to LGBTQ Appalachian authors being doubly erased—routinely overlooked both within United States literature because they are Appalachian and within the Appalachian literary tradition because they are queer. In exploring motifs of visibility, silence, storytelling, home, food, and more, Carey brings the full significance and range of LGBTQ Appalachian literature into relief. Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home are considered alongside works by Maggie Anderson, doris davenport, Jeff Mann, Lisa Alther, Julia Watts, Fenton Johnson, and Silas House, as well as filmmaker Beth Stephens. While primarily focused on 1976 to 2020, Doubly Erased also looks back to the region's literary "elders," thoughtfully mapping the place of sexuality in the lives and works of George Scarbrough, Byron Herbert Reece, and James Still.

This book explores the intersection between adaptation studies and what James F. English has called the “economy of prestige,” which includes formal prize culture as well as less tangible expressions such as canon formation, fandom, authorship, and performance. The chapters explore how prestige can affect many facets of the adaptation process, including selection, approach, and reception. The first section of this volume deals directly with cycles of influence involving prizes such as the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, and other major awards. The second section focuses on the juncture where adaptation, the canon, and awards culture meet, while the third considers alternative modes of locating and expressing prestige through adapted and adaptive intertexts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of adaptation, cultural sociology, film, and literature.

Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narratives. The volume also examines the public and personal everyday contexts within which popular texts are read, highlighting the ways in which such narratives have circulated across a variety of constantly changing media, including theatre, television, cinema and new computer-based digital forms. Case studies from key genres - crime fiction, romance and Gothic horror - as well as a full chronology and guide to further reading make this collection indispensable to all those interested in this complex and vibrant cultural field.

Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.

This book is a great resource for new graduate students interested in knowing how to navigate their studies more effectively and creatively.

Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Leah Anderst, Alissa S. Bourbonnais, Tyler Bradway, Natalja Chestopalova, Margaret Galvan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Katie Hogan, Jonathan M. Hollister, Yetta Howard, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Don L. Latham, Vanessa Lauber, Katherine Parker-Hay, Anne N. Thalheimer, Janine Utell, and Susan R. Van Dyne Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In a definitive collection of original essays, scholars cover the span of Bechdel’s career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel’s work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory. Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel’s creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form. Ultimately, the volume shows that Bechdel’s work consists of performing a series of selves—serializing the self, as it were—each constructed and refracted across and within her chosen artistic modes and genres.

Comics and sequential art are increasingly in use in college classrooms. Multimodal, multimedia and often collaborative, the graphic narrative format has entered all kinds of subject areas and its potential as a teaching tool is still being realized. This collection of new essays presents best practices for using comics in various educational settings, beginning with the basics. Contributors explain the need for teachers to embrace graphic novels. Multimodal composition is demonstrated by the use of comics. Strategies are offered for teachers who have struggled with weak visual literacy skills among students. Student-generated comics are discussed with several examples. The teaching of postmodern theories and practices through comics is covered. An appendix features assignment sheets so teachers can jump right in with proven exercises.

What is an “American” identity? The tension between populism and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, has marked the United States since its inception. In The Divided States, leading scholars and critics argue that the US is, and has always been, a site where multiple national identities intersect in productive and challenging ways. Scrutinizing conflicting nationalisms and national identities, the authors ask, Whose stories get told and whose do not? Who or what promotes the idea of a unified national identity in the United States? How is the notion of a unified national identity disrupted? What myths and stories bind the US together? How representative are these stories? What are the counternarratives? And, if the idea of national homogeneity is a fallacy, what does tie us together as a nation? Working across auto/biography studies, American studies, and human geography—all of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, “alternative facts,” and accountability—the essays engage in and contribute to critical conversations in classrooms, scholarship, and the public sphere. The authors draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology; class analysis; critical race theory; diasporic, refugee, and immigration studies; disability studies; gender studies; graphic and comix studies; Indigenous studies; linguistics; literary studies; sociology; and visual culture. And the genres under scrutiny include diary, epistolary communication, digital narratives, graphic narratives, literary narratives, medical narratives, memoir, oral history, and testimony. This fresh and theoretically engaged volume will be relevant to anyone interested in the multiplicity of voices that make up the US national narrative.

This book explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from the post-war period up to the present. It offers equal space to autobiographical comics penned by daughters who represent their fathers’ complicated and often disappointing behavior, and to works by male cartoonists who depict and usually celebrate their own experiences as fathers. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be forgiven can compromise the authors’ ethics or dictate style, considers the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects of dominant masculinities. By close reading these cartoonists’ complex strategies of (self-)representation, this volume also places photography and archival work alongside the problematic legacy of self-deprecation carried on from underground comics, and shows how the vocabulary of graphic narration can work with other media and at the intersection of various genres and modes to produce a valuable scrutiny of contemporary norms of fatherhood.

Mainstream narratives of the graphic novel’s development describe the form’s “coming of age,” its maturation from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. In Arresting Development, Christopher Pizzino questions these established narratives, arguing that the medium’s history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. Comics and their writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy and the struggles for status that marked their earlier history. Many graphic novelists are intensely aware of both the medium’s troubled past and their own tenuous status in contemporary culture. Arresting Development presents case studies of four key works—Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets—exploring how their authors engage the problem of comics’ cultural standing. Pizzino illuminates the separation of high and low culture, art and pulp, and sophisticated appreciation and vulgar consumption as continual influences that determine the limits of literature, the status of readers, and the value of the very act of reading.

James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce's defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce's modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce's fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce's sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce's work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce's classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang.

Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject, while also demanding new approaches from critics. Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art is a collection of essays about autobiography, semiautobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds including English, American studies, comparative literature, gender studies, art history, and cultural studies. The book engages with well-known figures such as Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel; with cult-status figures such as Martin Vaughn James; and with lesser-known works by artists such as Frédéric Boilet. Negotiations between artist/writer/body and drawn/written/text raise questions of how comics construct identity, and are read and perceived, requiring a critical turn towards theorizing the comics' viewer. At stake in comic memoir and semi-autobiography is embodiment. Remembering a scene with the intent of rendering it in sequential art requires nonlinear thinking and engagement with physicality. Who was in the room and where? What was worn? Who spoke first? What images dominated the encounter? Did anybody smile? Man or mouse? Unhinged from the summary paragraph, the comics artist must confront the fact of the flesh, or the corporeal world, and they do so with fascinating results.

This book examines the relationship between words and images in various life-writing works produced by nineteenth to twenty-first century American and British women. It addresses the politics of images in women’s life writing, contending that the presence or absence of images is often strategic. Including a range of different forms of life writing, chapters draw on traditional (auto)biographies, travel narratives, memoirs, diaries, autofiction, cancer narratives, graphic memoirs, artistic installations, quilts and online performances, as life writing moves from page to screen and other media. The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.

Despite feminism’s uneven movements, it has been predominantly understood through metaphors of generations or waves. Feminism's Queer Temporalities builds on critiques of the limitations of this linear model to explore alternative ways of imagining feminism’s timing. It finds in feminism’s literary and cultural archive narratives of temporality that might now be diagnosed as queer, where queer designates modes of being historical that exceed the linear and the generational. Few theorists have looked to popular feminist figures, literature, and culture to theorize feminism’s timing. Through methodologically creative readings, McBean explores non-generational, anti-linear, and asynchronous time in the figure of Antigone, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, the film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains, Valerie Solanas and SCUM Manifesto, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The first to substantially bring together the ways in which time has come to matter in both feminist and queer disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars of feminist, queer and gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies.

The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.

Written by Barry Singer—one of contemporary musical theater's most authoritative chroniclers—Ever After was originally published in 2003 as a history of the previous twenty-five years in musical theater, on and off Broadway. This new edition extends the narrative, taking readers from 2004 to the present. The book revisits every new musical that has opened since the last edition, with Barry Singer once again as guide. Before Ever After appeared in 2003, no book had addressed the recent past in musical theater history—an era Singer describes as "ever after musical theater's many golden ages." Derived significantly from Singer's writings about musical theater for the New York Times, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker, Ever After captured that era in its entirety, from the opening of The Act on Broadway in October 1977 to the opening of Avenue Q Off-Broadway in March 2003. This new edition brings Ever After up to date, from Wicked, through The Book of Mormon, to Hamilton and beyond. Once again, this the first book to cover this new, pre-pandemic age of the Broadway musical. And, once again, utilizing his recent writing about musical theater for HuffPost and Playbill, Barry Singer's viewpoint is comprehensive and absolutely unique.