Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels 1929-1937

<p>This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group – much like Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Keats’s great odes – in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward’s novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.</p> <p>Introduction: Origins</p><p>Chapter 1: The Silent Film, the Sketch and the Portrait in <i>Gods’ Man</i> (1929)</p><p>Chapter 2: Colonial Legacy and the Crime of Scholarship in <i>Madman’s Drum</i> (1930)</p><p>Chapter 3: Lynching, Labor and Homoeroticism in <i>Wild Pilgrimage</i> (1932)</p><p>Chapter 4: Disobedient Persuasions: <i>Prelude to a Million Years</i> (1933)</p><p>Chapter 5: The Limits of Allegory: <i>Song Without Words</i> (1936) and <i>Hymn for the Night</i> (ca. 1940)</p><p>Chapter 6: The Duplicity of the Word in <i>Vertigo</i> (1937)</p><p>Epilogue: <i>Dance of the Hours</i>; or, <em>Lynd Ward’s Last Unfinished Wordless Novel </em>(2001)</p>