The recipient of a 2000 MacArthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist’s career from 1988 to 2020.In some of his early strips published in the 1980s in ...

Explores the close relationship between comics and urbanism in one of Europe's most notable global cities.Barcelona, City of Comics introduces readers of English to a range of Spanish- and Catalan-language comics published after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. During this time of palpable social change, the Catalonian capital regained its reputation as the hub of comics publishing in Spain. Comics collectives such as El Rrollo and Butifarra...

Comics Beyond Text and Image conceptualizes comics as “bodies,” exploring the substance and the many movements and expressions of comics first and foremost in terms of corporeality.The book centers on the metaphor of the comics body as a way of opening up our understandings of what comics do. It begins from the position that narrative in comics is corporeal, expressed in and through the visual bodies into which the page can be divided analytically, and from the interaction...

This book highlights an interdisciplinary terrain where the humanities and social sciences combine with digital methods. It argues that while disciplinary frictions still condition the potential of digital projects, the nature of the urban phenomenon pushes us toward an interdisciplinary and digital future where the primacy of cities is assured.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020More and more people are noticing links between urban geography and the spaces within the layout of panels on the comics page. Benjamin Fraser explores the representation of the city in a range of comics from across the globe. Comics address the city as an idea, a historical fact, a social construction, a material-built environment, a shared space forged from the collective imagination, or as a social arena navigat...

Although many depictions of the city in prose, poetry, and visual art can be found dating from earlier periods in human history, Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City emphasizes a particular phase in urban development. This is the quintessentially modern city that comes into being in the nineteenth century. In social terms, this nineteenth-century city is the product of a specialist class of planners engaged in what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre has called the bourgeois scie...

Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading and Writing the Rails delves into the rich connections between rail travel and the creation of cultural products from short stories to novels, from photographs to travel guides, and from artistic manifestos of the avant-garde to Freud’s psychology. Each of the contributions engages in critical readings of textual or visual representations of trains across a wide spectrum of time periods and traditions—from English and American to Mexican, West Africa...

Brought to you by Penguin.'An utterly delightful book to read, Dreyer's English will stand among the classics on how to use the English language properly.' ELIZABETH STROUT'A complete joy. Wise, funny, no-nonsense, stylish and brilliantly practical.’ RACHEL JOYCEAn indispensable, New York Times-bestselling guide to the craft of writing from Random House’s long-time copy chief and one of Twitter’s le...

Marxism and Urban Culture is the first volume to reconcile social science and humanities perspectives on culture. Covering a range of global cities—Bologna, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mexico City, Montreal, Osaka, Strasbourg, Vienna—the contributions fuse political and theoretical concerns with analyses of urban cultural practices and historical movements, as well as urban-themed literary and filmic art. Conceived as a response t...

Cognitive Disability Aesthetics explores the invisibility of cognitive disability in theoretical, historical, social, and cultural contexts. Benjamin Fraser’s cutting edge research and analysis signals a second-wave in disability studies that prioritizes cognition. Fraser expands upon previous research into physical disability representations and focuses on those disabilities that tend to be least visible in society (autism, Down syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia). Movi...

Born in Mallorca, Pere Joan Riera (known professionally as Pere Joan) thrived in the underground comics world, beginning in the mid-1970s with the self-published collections Baladas Urbanas and MuŽrdago, both of which were released almost immediately after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco and Spain's transition to democracy. The first monograph in English on a comics artist from the Spain, The Art of Pere Joan takes a topographical approach to reading comics, applying theories of...

An important contribution to the still evolving field of 'urban cultural studies,' Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience is the first book to thoroughly apply the French urban philosopher's thoughts on cities to the culture and literature of Spain. Fraser shows how Lefebvre's complex view of the city as a mobile phenomenon is relevant to understanding a variety of Spanish cultural products—from urban plans and short writings on the urban experience during the nineteenth century b...