"Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole." Thus does Maurice Merleau-Ponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life.

Pilote's unique position in a new and fast developing youth press market.

The French comic magazine Pilote hebdomadaire arrived in a weakening comics market in 1959 largely dominated by syndicated translations of American comics and comics inspired by a Catholic ethos. It tailored its content and tone to an older adolescent reader far removed from that of France's infant comic. Pilote's profile set it on a turbulent course subject to the vicissitudes and fickleness of fashion which situated i...

Portugal's vibrant comics scene originated as early as the 19th century, bringing forth brilliant individual artists, but has remained mostly unknown beyond Portugal’s borders to this day. Now a new generation employs this medium to put into question hegemonic views on the economy, politics, and society. Following the experience of the financial crisis of the past decades and its impact on social policies, access to and rules of public discourse, and civil strife, comics have questioned wha...

Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice offers an innovative, wide-ranging and geographically diverse book-length treatment of girlhood in comics. The various contributing authors and artists provide novel insights into established themes within comic studies, children’s comics, graphic medicine and comics by and about refugees and marginalised ethnic or cultural groups. The book enriches traditional historical, narratological and aesthetic approaches to studying girlhood in comics with practice-...

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks t...

When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European cities is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity. This volume expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth an...

What does it mean to live under occupation? How does it shape the culture and identities of European nations? How does it affect the way we write and read literature? These are fundamental questions that set the stage for an in-depth exploration. Focusing on the literary works of writers from various European countries that were occupied by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the Allies during and after World War II, the contributions in this edited volume seek to unravel the complex interplay ...

A reader's history exploring girls' comics.Girls' comics were a major genre from the 1950s onwards in Britain and the most popular titles sold between 800,000 and a million copies a week. However, this genre was slowly replaced by magazines which now dominate publishing for girls. Remembered Reading is a readers' history which explores the genre, and memories of those comics, looking at how and why this rich history has been forgotten. The research is based around both analysis of what the ti...

With a key focus on mixed methods, coverage of the 'why' as well as the 'how', and a clear explanation of the CORE system, this book will be instrumental in helping readers to produce organized, ethical, insightful and, of course, comprehensive literature reviews.

Boredom and melancholy in the experience of reading.

Contemporary graphic novels show an interesting shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary in slice-of-life stories in which nothing happens. Present-day graphic accounts are inhabited by melancholic characters whining about the lack of meaning in life. This book examines this intriguing transition and brings a historical, aesthetical and narratological approach to comics in which boredom is not only a topic, but also awakens a deliberate...