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Book Cover for: Comics and Novelization: A Literary History of Bandes Dessinées, Benoît Glaude

Comics and Novelization: A Literary History of Bandes Dessinées

Benoît Glaude

This book opens a novel perspective on comics and literature interactions. It claims that the two artistic media have always maintained a mutual emulation, for as long as they have coexisted in media culture. To demonstrate this, the present research does not focus on literary adaptations in comics form but rather on a literary corpus that remains virtually unexplored: comics-related novels. The purpose of this volume is to inventory French comics-related novels and to study them. Within the limits of the French-speaking world, this book pieces together a literary history of bande dessinée through its novels, from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Although the comic strip - including the aptly named "graphic novel" - has sometimes been regarded as the disciple of an unsurpassable literary model, do these under-studied adaptations in novel form not rather indicate a mutual relationship, or even an emulation, between the two media?

Book Details

  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Publish Date: Oct 8th, 2024
  • Pages: 206
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
  • EAN: 9781032482729
  • Categories: European - FrenchComics & Graphic NovelsMedia Studies

About the Author

Benoît Glaude is a researcher at Universiteit Gent and a visiting lecturer at Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He has published several books about French-speaking comics, including his PhD on comics dialogues (La Bande dialoguée, 2019), as well as a volume on novelization in children's literature (Les Novellisations pour la jeunesse, coedited with Laurent Déom, 2020).

Praise for this book

"The relationship between comics and literature is not one-way traffic: literature is not only adapted in graphic novel format, it also owes a lot to the world of comics, appropriating its forms and themes in many ways. Relying on a strong theoretical framework and robust case studies, Benoît Glaude's trail-blazing study discloses this less known but vital dimension of intermedial connections in modern transmedia culture."

Jan Baetens, KULeuven, Belgium

"The meticulous research and clever thinking shown in this new work represents some of the most influential scholarship in the last decade. Benoît Glaude is a scholar of the highest order and his nuanced treatment is rigorous and powerful."

Hugo Frey, University of Chichester, UK

"Up until now, novelizations had attracted little academic interest. Benoît Glaude's compelling study shows the interest of looking into this little-known corpus of texts adapting comics into literature. Nourished by fascinating case studies, his book considerably renews our approach to transmedia cultures and opens up a field of primary importance in our understanding of the history of the ninth art."

Sylvain Lesage, Université de Lille, France

"This remarkable work of scholarship brings a new perspective and sharp analytical insights to the study of transmedia adaptation, while providing a master class in the close reading of some famous comics alongside the fascinating and little-known novels that they have engendered."

Ann Miller, University of Leicester, UK