Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2016
Department
English
Language
English
Publication Title
Journal of Modern Literature
Abstract
Lynd Ward’s “novels in woodcuts” — long-form narratives Ward pioneered in America between 1929 and 1937 and composed entirely in the medium of sequential wood engravings — have been widely neglected in both art historical and literary critical scholarship despite engaging crucial questions in American modernism and anticipating the contemporary rise of graphic narrative. Ward’s oeuvre here is viewed through his sustained ambivalence toward the commercialization of the arts, both in his texts and his work as a publisher. His critical erasure is as much a function of modernist scholarship’s continued irresolution toward the relationship between high art and popular culture as it is of the singularly hybrid status of his texts. Seen through the lens of comics studies, author/artists like Ward reside in a place at the intersection of literature and the fine arts, allowing us to reimagine many of the critical commonplaces of modernist scholarship.
DOI
10.2979/jmodelite.39.2.10
Recommended Citation
Ball, David M. "Lynd Ward’s Modernist “Novels in Woodcuts”: Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature." Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 2 (2016): 126-143. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614026
Included in
American Studies Commons, Art and Design Commons, Creative Writing Commons, English Language and Literature Commons
Comments
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