Comic Novels Research Articles

“Yahoo-yahoos and Twitter kweens”: Internet technologies in contemporary Nigerian fiction

ABSTRACTThis article examines the representation of Internet technologies in two recent Nigerian comic novels, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (2009) I Do Not Come to You by Chance and A. Igoni Barrett’s (2015) Blackass. Departing from founding mythologies of the Internet as a space of global assimilation and extending beyond extant postcolonial concerns with technological exclusion or malfunction, the article demonstrates how Internet technologies facilitate forms of global subjectification that amplify rather than diminish national consciousness. Reading Nwaubani’s representations of “419” email fraud alongside Barrett’s experimental approach to Twitter form, the article shows how both novels critically reflect upon the globalizing potentials and limitations of Internet technologies from the perspective of a “post-development” Nigeria. It argues that these novels depict characters dialectically engaging with national and global contexts – mobilizing national stereotypes to address global audiences – yet, in turn, redeploying global capital (financial and cultural) to achieve more localized forms of status.

Retranslations of World Fairy Tales and Western Novels by XU Zhuodai

From the 1910s to the early 1920s Xu Zhuodai translated many fairy tales from around the world and Western novels into Chinese, via Japanese translations. His “World Fairy Tales” series, based on the “Otogibanashi” series by Iwaya Sazanami, were integral to the development of the Zhonghua Book Company, and represented an important milestone in China’s initial evolution of children’s literature. His translations of Western prose texts, including short stories by world-renowned authors such as Tolstoy, Maupassant, and Mark Twain, as well as long detective novels by the popular French writers Maurice Leblanc and Fortuné du Boisgobey, were based on Japanese translations such as those in “Various Comic Novels” by Sasaki Kuni. These translations of fairy tales and other texts reflect Xu Zhuodai’s concern for education and his love of humorous literature. How the translation of foreign literature influenced Xu Zhuodai’s literary output is a topic worth exploring in the future.

The Mighty Walzer

Howard Jacobson is a British author who is proud of being labelled a Jewish writer and does not hesitate to describe himself as ‘entirely and completely Jewish’. He believes that English-Jewish writers should address directly the challenge of being Jewish, which is precisely what he does in The Mighty Walzer (1999). The novel shows once again Jacobson’s greatness as a comic novelist and thus reinforces his assumption that the ingenious, joking Jew is the Jew in essence. Like many scholars, Jacobson believes that self-aimed humour has allowed Jewish people to cope with the paradoxical nature of their culture and historical situation. In The Mighty Walzer Jacobson proves to be the Jew par excellence by joking about everything from religion to food, making fun of the contradictions and incongruities of Jewish life.

Black women’s complicated laughter and Toni Morrison’s post-migration novels

ABSTRACT Toni Morrison is not conventionally viewed as a humourist or comic novelist; her chosen subject-matter has inevitably led critics to explore the bleak, tragic and painful dimensions of her writing.Her deployment of both comic anger and of the absurd dimensions of black American history, however, has yet to be properly recognised. This article does not seek to demonstrate Morrison’s place within the tradition of African American women’s politicised humour, however rightful and obscured that place may be. My analysis here instead builds on the general idea that black humour has serious concerns to examine one very specific phenomenon: that of Morrison as a theorist of laughter. In an unprecedented reading, I argue that Morrison’s fiction contains within it a sustained and sophisticated consideration of the act of laughter, the sound of laughter, the look of laughter, and the power of laughter. I am interested in the aesthetic and political dimensions of Morrison’s representation of laugher itself – in her descriptions of not just why but how characters laugh, and of her detailed attention to the variously transformative effects of the act of laughing. Acknowledging this author’s preoccupation with the seriousness of laughter is key to understanding her work, her position within twentieth/twenty-first century black American cultural production, and the complex nature of her intellectual legacy. After tracing a neglected genealogy of black women’s laughter through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, my exploration focuses on the three ‘post-migration novels’.

Visages comiques de Mentor. Remarques sur les figures magistrales dans le roman comique

Les romans comiques actualisent la figure du mentor par la présence de personnages tantôt maitre, tantôt guide, passés au crible du soupçon. Francion renvoie l’image satirique du maitre comme bourreau, Hortensius, complétée par la figure du guide, Raymond, ami ouvrant Francion au libertinage. Le guide lui-même offre une image complexe : Anselme incarne un guide paradoxal puisqu’il conforte le berger extravagant dans sa folie, quitte à écorner les valeurs de l’amitié. Chez Cyrano, le Démon de Socrate enseigne une « burlesque pédagogie » qui fera s’émanciper Dyrcona de Campanella. La mise à distance de l’autorité (y compris celle du pseudo-éditeur du Francion) inscrit ainsi la lecture critique comme principe légitimant consubstantiel au genre.

Interview with Novelist Sarah Bird

Interview with Novelist Sarah Bird Richard J. Golsan (bio) Richard J. Golsan (RJG): What is your favorite novel? Sarah Bird (SB): My comfort food novel, the one I pulled out back in those high anxiety days when we were bleaching our groceries was Dog of the South by the inimitable Charles Portis. RJG: When did you first discover this novel? SB: Charles Portis arrived at a golden moment in my reading life. I was in my late-twenties, so this would have been late-Seventies, early eighties. Though I wasn't exactly conscious of it, I was groping my way toward writing comic novels. I was probably set on this path early by my wildly idiosyncratic family. We were six children in a military family that moved far, far too much for our group of pathologically shy introverts. In endless drives, flights, and ocean crossings to an endless succession of new bases we formed a sort of six-way twinship. The only humans we were actually comfortable with were each other. We were able to endure the purgatories of our new schools with their bewildering assault of strangers because, at the end of each day, we could go home and lose ourselves in books. Books seemed to simply filter into our lives the way food, borne on underground ocean currents, filters into an amoeba. We'd reach out and ingest whatever reading matter a sib introduced into our biosphere and it would be digested and absorbed into our hermetic little world. My sisters who adored all non-human animals infected us with Watership Down and we all joyfully re-entered our lost childhood worlds of talking animals. To this day we will praise an exceptionally fine meal in Lapine, calling it "flay-rah." Or note that a surprised or perplexed sibling has "gone tharn." If feeling particularly frisky we might even pretend to freeze in fear, "go tharn," at the sound of the rabbit's greatest enemy, those gas-powered monsters, the "hrududil." We re-enacted Eliza's escape on the ice floes from Uncle Tom's Cabin with flattened packing boxes from our latest move strewn across the backyard of whatever base house we'd been assigned. At the Base Pool [End Page 178] we pretended to be either Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins or the dolphins she befriended. We all wept together while reading Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner. But the novel that marked the Before and After in our hive mind reading was Confederacy of Dunces. RJG: What was it about "Confederacy" that spoke to all of you? SB: This is simple: It made us laugh. I probably would have chosen Dunces as my pandemic comfort food book except that I've read and re-read it too many times. Also, it feels a bit too claustrophobic for a pandemic. Dog, a road trip novel, is far more expansive. I'm going to have delay speaking of my love of Dog for a moment to set the stage for its arrival, so back to Dunces. I had the glorious experience of encountering John Kennedy Toole's masterpiece without knowing a thing about it when my youngest brother, who was studying bio-chemical engineering at the time, stuck it in my hands, and said, "Read." One way to understand how sui generis Dunces was is to consider the authors Toole's posthumous 1981 Pulitzer was sandwiched between: Cheever, Updike, and Mailer. Imagine going, for example, from Cheever's overachieving characters awakening to the emptiness of their lives in the suburbs to Ignatius J. Reilly, the ultimate outsider, an oafish, obese, scabrous gargantuan, as dedicated to self-abuse as he is to the Middle Ages. This novel plugged into my family's genome like a missing strand of DNA. We lived that novel like no other. We christened our mother "Santa Battaglia," took to cursing "Fortuna, that vicious slut," and excused any dyspeptic behavior by explaining that our "valve had plopped shut." For a very long time after, all our reading sought to duplicate the experience of Dunces. My youngest brother introduced Sotweed Factor into our literary food stream and we milked a few...

Comic Books and Graphic Novels for the Differentiated Humanities Classroom

To broaden the appeal of social studies and English content, the authors share how they use multimedia storytelling to increase student engagement, differentiate instruction, and consider multiple viewpoints.

Public school life during the Victorian fin-de-siècle: Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street novel

ABSTRACT The two-volume novel Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972), a Scottish writer more famous now for his later comic novels, tends to be overlooked in the list of novels depicting English public school life. The first volume of Mackenzie’s novel traces the protagonist’s public school career at the nineteenth century’s close. Despite the sensitivity required when dealing with fiction as a source for historical understanding, Sinister Street can shed useful light on public school life at a time of transition. Mackenzie’s account is fictional but the experience of public school life within Sinister Street often chimes with reality, even though the chime may distort or mask much of what we know from historical record. In alluding to the march of an expanding middle class into the schools, the persistence of the gentlemanly ethos, the role of sports, and the tensions within the curriculum, the novel offers insight into the public school experience. It also illuminates the close of the nineteenth century, as events in the wider world impinge on the school and those who are part of it. Sinister Street is a useful source for historians of education in understanding the historical continuity and change that public schools underwent during this time.

An Interview with A.N. Wilson

Andrew Wilson, published as A.N. Wilson, is a British writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Beginning his career as an acclaimed comic novelist in the late 1970s, his work has since embraced literary biography, history, and novels that have moved beyond comedy to encompass faith and historical settings. In 2007 his novel Winnie and Wolf was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize; his most recent work is the acclaimed literary biography The Mystery of Charles Dickens.Nick Turner conducted the interview with Andrew Wilson by email in April 2020, focusing on the Andrew Wilson’s diverse writing interests, the work of Iris Murdoch, his new book on Dickens, the appeal of the Victorian age, and the writers that have inspired him in the past.

Paris polymorphe: égarements et détours dans Polyandre de Charles Sorel

Polyandre (1648), roman inachevé de Charles Sorel, déconstruit le schéma picaresque traditionnellement opératoire dans le genre de l'histoire comique. Sorel, dans la préface qui accompagne le dernier avatar de sa trilogie comique, se revendique d'une esthétique de la diversité. Sorte de pícaro urbain, Polyandre, homme d’âge mûr de retour à Paris après un intermède provincial, délaisse le voyage de formation pour lui préférer la promenade. Roman bourgeois peignant la vie des figures les plus variées et médiocres, Polyandre est un impressionnant compte rendu de la topographie parisienne et des archétypes sociaux qui y circulent. Les errements de Polyandre agissent comme agrégateurs de personnages typés: le personnage picaresque, défini par sa mobilité sociale et sa perméabilité morale, devient, par inversion comique, promeneur et juge. Mais ces déplacements et décalages burlesques sont aussi, voire surtout, une expression métaphorique de la fonction même de l'histoire comique, qui devient espace d'exploration et laboratoire social.

Combatant Prose in Modern Ukrainian Literature: Genre and Stylistic Features

During the last few years a signifi cant number of texts covering a huge range of genres appeared within the Ukrainian literary community with a purpose to depict the recent events of the war taking place in the East of the country. The most complete list of such literary texts created by Anna Skorina has more than 400 positions. It includes poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, non-fi ction (documentaries and political researches), photo albums and, surprisingly, comic books and a graphic novel. Moreover, the list is permanently updated. There are both civilians (writers, journalists, volunteers) and combatants among the authors of the texts. The prose written by the latter group of authors is an important and interesting phenomenon of the modern Ukrainian literary process. The group includes professional writers conscripted into Ukrainian Armed Forces or enlisted in the Volunteer Batallions as well as authors without pre-war experience of being related to the literary beau monde. To a certain extent their texts belong to documentaries or to the literature of fact. Most authors resort to self-descriptive writing for comprehending their recent experience and psychological changes it caused. These works can be classifi ed as ego-documents (diaries, memoires) and ego-texts (autobiographical fiction and essays). Genre diffusion is a characteristic feature of memoires and autobiographical prose, the combatant prose being no exception. Such popular fi ction genres as comic books and graphic novels must be considered a rather interesting practice within modern military literature. The paper emphasizes the incorrectness of identifying modern combatant prose with so-called lieutenant prose, the Soviet literary phenomenon, as these groups of texts have essential differences that exceed by far their common features.

Chloe AridjisSea Monsters

Nota Bene Lindsay Tuggle Calenture Cordite Books From widely published and venerated Australian poet Lindsay Tuggle comes a stirring collection of poetry that draws strength from both its unapologetic entrenchment in the female experience and in its willingness to delve into the immensely personal heart of every issue that fills its pages. Performing poetic subversions of long-held notions about the subjects of death, loss, and the societal perception of femininity, Calenture is at once uncomfortable and hauntingly memorable. Tanguy Viel Article 353 Trans. William Rodarmor Other Press This terse novel uses the form of a legal deposition to unspool the complex set of events that precipitate a murder. Tanguy Viel uses the sprawling dialogue to critique the fraying threads of the French social fabric in the broader tapestry of twenty-firstcentury Europe. Nobody’s sure if the scholar of Nazi Germany jumped or was pushed. With a cast of treacherous academics and rumors of a pilfered Third Reich relic, The Republic has all the makings of a canny, if derivative, intellectual thriller. De Vries, however, is a comic novelist with metafictional inclinations. Mainly, he’s interested in exploring what it means to work within a milieu—in this case, the world of university publishing—that places a premium on developing new narratives. Why do humans build reductive tales out of discrete, often unrelated events? The travails of his protagonist, a Brik disciple named Friso de Vos, might help us arrive at an answer. The editor of a journal of Hitler-related scholarship, de Vos falls ill during a work trip.Whenhewakesup in a hospital, he learns of Brik’s death. Another Brik devotee, Philip de Vries (note that he shares the author’s last name), has stepped in and delivered a glowing eulogy. De Vos is crestfallen—he was supposed to be the one “giving Brik’s death meaning” by “fitting it into a story.” Eager to reinstall himself atop the Brikian hierarchy, he resolves to impersonate —and thereby humiliate—his rival. His increasingly reckless antics will draw the attention of Nazi artifact-fetishists and far-right politicos. De Vries’s tone is droll, nonchalant. The Dutch writer’s depiction of a punch-up at an academic conference is funny, but he has an unaccountable weakness for sight gags. One chapter includes images of inanimate objects that resemble Hitler, giving it the feel of a forgettable internet meme. Though de Vries’s plot is competently assembled, his narrative games are distracting. Many novelists have named characters after themselves , but his reasons for doing so remain obscure. His decision to import fictional professors from elsewhere—Jack Gladney, a Hitler scholar from Don DeLillo’s superb White Noise, makes several appearances— only reminds the reader of better books. Eyeing a snowy city square in Austria, de Vos notes that it’s “as white as an unwritten Word document,” ready to be filled with stories. There’s a promising yarn at the heart of The Republic, but it’s burdened by a glut of gimmicks. Kevin Canfield New York Chloe Aridjis Sea Monsters Trans. Anne McLean. New York. Catapult. 2019. 224 pages. One doesn’t have to see the carved face of the Grand Canyon to know water is powerful and mysterious but also beautiful. It is this combination of danger and poetic mystery that draws a middleclass teenager like Luisa out of her books and into the arms of Joy Division, indifferent romance, and the crashing waves of Zipolite, the beach of death. Chloe Aridjis crafts an undulating story not of innocence lost but innocence exchanged. Luisa exchanges her ordinary and unexceptional days to solve a mystery. This action will lead her to a beach where she meets strangers she believes will want to hear her story, though in truth, she lacks a tale anyone would find thrilling. Yet the title of the novel seems to promise malicious creatures. As one follows Luisa’s decisions, which lead her away from her predictable middle-class life, the sea WORLDLIT.ORG 107 Andrzej Franaszek Herbert: Biografia 2 vols. Kraków. Wydawnictwo Znak. 2018. 857 & 958 pages. Andrzej Franaszek once again undertook a gigantic task when, after his successful biography of Nobel Prize–winning Polish...

Laughter, or An Ambivalent Gesture of Resistance and Compromise―A study of the comic novels for adult written by Cho Heun-pa from the 1950s to the 1960s―

Laughter, or An Ambivalent Gesture of Resistance and Compromise―A study of the comic novels for adult written by Cho Heun-pa from the 1950s to the 1960s―

Kalooki Nights or the sacred duty to remember the Holocaust

ABSTRACT Jewish people have used humor as a talisman to survive in a world hedged with the threat of every horror and every ignominy. Howard Jacobson is a great comic novelist who fuses comedy and tragedy in his novels because he firmly believes that the more tragic the themes the more obliged he is to exploit the comedy in them. In fact, in Kalooki Nights Jacobson shows not only that it is possible to laugh about the Holocaust without minimizing the horrifying reality being explored, but that comedy is a mode of survival that offers us a renewed sense of life in the midst of so much pain.

Encapsulating Irish English in literature

ABSTRACTThis article examines the representation of Irish English in contemporary Irish writing, with particular reference to the narrative of the Ross O'Carroll‐Kelly saga, a series of comic novels created by Irish writer Paul Howard which has enjoyed phenomenal success in Ireland, due in part to the author's ability to convey contemporary spoken English in Dublin. Our study consists of a corpus analysis of three of his novels, where we are able to describe a number of key stylistic features which are distinctive of Howard's representation of Irish English, including the variable use of such discourse markers as like, roysh and yeah + no, as well as the use of the intensifying so.

Nathanael West, Secularism, and the Uses of Comedy

This essay is an attempt to understand the elusive metaphysical and ethical meanings of the comic in Nathanael West, and in doing so to chart the possible relations between secularism and comedy. West described his fiction as “moral satire,” yet he is also a comedian of cultural “discourse,” and the normative discourses necessary to the moral energies of satire are travestied in his work. I argue that to elucidate this paradox we must read West as an ironist of irony and a satirist of satire; West is an unrelenting comic novelist who nonetheless thematizes the existential uses of comedy and accentuates their dangers and limits. I show how this tension unfolds with regard to secularism and religion, particularly in Miss Lonelyhearts: West’s comic deflations of religious aspiration seem aligned with a vehement secular materialism, yet West brings his irony to bear on the discourse of secularism itself, and the characters that understand themselves as masterful comic agents must do penance as comic objects.

Onomastic Deviations and Metaliterary Consequences in the Gascon Extravagant

IN his article, Les peregrinations du gascon Emmanuel Desiles proposes that the intent of the comic novelist in the seventeenth century is to warn the reader about fiction du langage, et plus generalement des signes (330). Such a thesis seems reinforced by what we know of the comic novelist of the period. The conception of the lecteur discret, proposed by Aleman in his preface to Guzman de Alfarache (1599) and echoed by Sorel in his Advertissement d'importance aux lecteurs, at the beginning of the Histoire comique de Francion, (1) is inherent in the comic novelist's literary imagination. In Claireville's Gascon extravagant (1637), the reader's literary awareness is tested more than in perhaps any other comic novel of the period. The novel's structure is complex, comprising various intercalated narratives that are woven together in a fragmentary tale that lacks a conclusion and puts the very nature of the novel into question. Through various onomastic deviations, the fictional nature of the tale is continuously renewed and the reader is challenged by the metaliterary consciousness of the author. These onomastic deviations and the intercalated structure underscore the to which Desiles refers that punctuate the fictional language of the genre. It is the purpose of this paper to examine these signs, to evaluate the influence of said signs upon the structure of the text itself, and to consider how the reader is intended to react. In order to elaborate the metaliterary nature of the novel, I will focus on two specific aspects of its design that underscore Claireville's intent: firstly, the novel's structure and the importance of the paratext and, secondly, images of the author and the reader within the text and onomastic deviations that remind the reader that these are not just characters with whom to empathize but rather elements of the novel that fulfill specific functions within the text. Through this careful construction, Claireville makes of his en proces a metanovel that at its core explores the very nature of the nascent comic novel itself. Finally, in the conclusion, I consider how this reading dialogues with the theoretical notion of early modern fictionality. Sorel announces, with the Francion, a nascent subgenre that is used today by specialists to collect a number of texts under its umbrella. While each text varies in subject matter, Jean Serroy has worked extensively to note shared characteristics and functions of many of these texts, noting that they, for the most part, share a comic tone that permits the author to examine reality as the author viewed it (702-07). Serroy classifies the Gascon extravagant as belonging to the second of three periods of development in the comic novel's history: that of affirmation (291-361). In this phase, Serroy includes Sorel's Berger extravagant (1627-28) and Du Verdier's Le chevalier hypocondriaque (1632) as examples of works that engage with modes like the pastoral or the chivalric to offer satiric and comic reinventions of the modal conventions. For Serroy, the comic novel at this moment with Sorel's Berger extravagant denounces l'artifice d' un romanesque conceived as a game of contraintes techniques, thematiques, voire stylistiques. Thus, Sorel incites tout un courant parodique qui en souligne les and detache le roman des tentations de la fiction pure, et proclame que l'invention ne saurait se passer de realite ni l'ecriture du naturel (703). The comic novel's role is, then, to explore reality within the confines of a comic mode (designed to incite laughter) and reflecting the sociohistorical influence of the noblesse on this reality. In essence, Serroy views the comic novel as a work by an author highly conscious of textual conventions of the period who chooses to interact therewith. The Gascon extravagant, however, not only plays with conventional norms of other forms, but, I posit, also considers the early examples of comic novels as extant at the moment, in the first third of the seventeenth century, interacting in particular with Sorel's notion of the genre. …

'Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women’s language' Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)

Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women's language Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)Women's language is a highly salient category in Japan, which most large Japanese language dictionaries define as the style of speech spoken by women since ancient times. For a long time, it has been assumed that this 'speech peculiar to women' is naturally derived from nyooboo kotoba (court-women's speech), the speech created by women in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century, and also from yuujogo (play-women's speech), the speech used by women in the licensed quarters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Japanese society, there is a widespread notion that women have always spoken differently from men, and that these differences are the result of their feminine nature.In this book, Momoko Nakamura emphasizes the heterogeneity of women's linguistic practices in Japan and defends the notion of women's language as an ideological construction, closely linked to historical, political and economic processes. In opposition to the common assumption of women's language as women's actual speech and as a reflection of 'innate femininity', she provides a historical-discourse analysis of written documents, such as conduct books, school textbooks, dictionaries, grammar books and commentaries by intellectuals, in which women's language is prescribed, marginalized and conceptualized in different ways, depending on the historic and political context. This genealogy of women's language in Japan is of great interest for both researchers on Japanese language and language and gender, as it illuminates the importance of history, discourse and ideology in order to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language. To this end, the author discusses the implications of the analysis in each chapter from this general perspective. The book comprises ten chapters that are organized into four parts, chronologically ordered, from the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII (1945-1952).Part 1 addresses how norms of feminine speech are constructed in the discourses of conduct books (etiquette manuals) from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Strongly influenced by the androcentric view of Confucianism dominant in this age, these conduct books establish appropriate ways of speaking for women, thus treating women's speech as an object of regulation, control and normalization. Chapter 1 shows that these normative discourses include not displaying intelligence and not using Chinese words, but are specially focused on limiting women's right to speak, regarding their talk as a dangerous act that can bring trouble to families. It is worth mentioning that these historical discourses on silence or 'not speaking too much' as an ideal for women, and on women's talk as malicious gossip, have also been documented by studies with reference to Spanish (Lozano Domingo, 1995; Acuna Ferreira, 2015) and to many other languages (Spender, 1980; Romaine, 1999).Chapter 2 focuses on the establishment of court-women's speech as another norm of feminine speech in a large number of conduct books which appeared from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Court-women's speech was created by women serving in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century and it consisted of creative word formation to refer to domestic items such as food, kitchen utensils and clothes. Nakamura analyses funny stories and dramatic comic novels in which court-women's speech is represented as a symbol of being upper-class, a way of speaking that servant women refused but probably needed to attain employment at samurai mansions, and even as a style of speech that was also used by men, though this was later prohibited. Conduct books in this period, however, redefined court-women's speech as a norm of feminine speech, as a list of words that all women should use. …

Dennis, Alan and Arthur x 3: Literary Legacies of the ‘Blazing Car Murder’ of 1930

The ‘blazing car murder’ committed by Alfred Arthur Rouse in 1930 was a sensational cause célèbre due to a number of factors, including Rouse's reference, on his arrest, to his ‘harem'; his career as a travelling salesman; and the failure to identify the corpse found burned to death in his car. The case has inspired famous authors, such as the playwright and television writer Dennis Potter, the graphic comic novelist Alan Moore, and the detective fiction writers Dorothy L. Sayers and P.D. James, to write imaginative literary works linked to the case. This article analyses the more significant of those works – those by Potter and Moore – and addresses the link between true crime and literary imagination.

The End Will Be Graphic: Apocalyptic in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Edited by Dan W.Clanton, Jr. The Bible in the Modern World, 43. Apocalypse and Popular, 5. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012. Pp. vii + 114. $70.00.

The End Will Be Graphic: Apocalyptic in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Edited by Dan W.Clanton, Jr. The Bible in the Modern World, 43. Apocalypse and Popular, 5. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012. Pp. vii + 114. $70.00.