Results by title

How manga and comics reshape storytelling across cultures

Text and Image is a groundbreaking exploration of how Japanese manga and comics from the United States and United Kingdom craft meaning through the combination of words and pictures. Current scholarship often isolates manga in niche genre studies or prioritizes anime instead; in response, Deborah Shamoon proposes a unified framework for understanding paneled visual storytelling across cultures. She reframes comics not as kids’ stuff but as a sophisticated narrative art with its own grammar, rhythm, and visual poetics.

Drawing on narratology, art history, film studies, and media theory, Text and Image examines a vast array of material, from four-panel comic strips to different manga genres, including shōjo (girls’ romance comics), shōnen (teen action), seinen (adult drama), and gekiga (mature realism). Through close visual analysis, Shamoon demonstrates how creators use panel layout, pacing, and the choreography of text and image to shape emotional impact and narrative momentum. She reveals the shared techniques that link works as disparate as Fun Home and Spider-Man while also showing where cultural conventions diverge. Beyond the traditional print realm, Shamoon discusses digital platforms, such as webtoons and vertically scrolling comics, to show how new technologies merge manga’s cinematic sensibility with global innovation.

Making a bold case for a more expansive, inclusive theory of visual narrative that bridges long-standing divides between manga studies and Anglophone comics scholarship, Text and Image is an indispensable guide to understanding how contemporary stories work and why they resonate across borders.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

The Flowery Death is a groundbreaking exploration of xochimiquiztli, or “flowery death,” a central concept in the pre-Hispanic Nahua worldview. In the highly militarized societies of the Valley of Mexico, dying in honor of the gods—on the battlefield, in ritual sacrifice, or in childbirth—was not only a social expectation but also a path to spiritual glory. While this idea appears throughout colonial sources, previous studies have relied largely on the writings of Bernardino de Sahagún and other European chroniclers, whose perspectives often simplify or distort Indigenous understandings.

Drawing on the rich oral tradition preserved in the sixteenth-century manuscript Cantares Mexicanos, this book provides one of the first English translations of these songs since John Bierhorst’s 1985 translation. It combines paleographic fidelity, literal English translation, and detailed interpretation, revealing the metaphor- and symbol-rich meanings behind the songs. The book is divided into two interrelated parts: The first reconstructs the Nahua worldview, contextualizing war, death, and sacrifice through myths, chronicles, and visual sources; the second presents selected songs, offering readers the tools to understand their metaphors, historical references, and symbolic language, making the work both a scholarly reference and an accessible guide for students and enthusiasts.

By examining the cultural, religious, and social significance of xochimiquiztli, The Flowery Death provides fresh insights into Nahua ideology, gender roles, and collective memory. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Mesoamerican culture, early colonial history, and the power of Indigenous oral traditions.

Racial identity and literary form in the modernist anthology

The Image and the Fire examines the coterie anthology—a small, outsider literary collection—as a key, yet understudied, instrument of literary intervention within American modernism. Whit Frazier Peterson argues that these anthologies, produced outside of institutional or canonical frameworks, served as deliberate challenges to dominant literary paradigms. Distinct from academic anthologies that helped codify the American literary canon, coterie anthologies were used by both white and Black avant-garde movements to disrupt prevailing cultural narratives and assert alternative literary visions.

Through close analysis of three seminal case studies—Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound; Fire!!, a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine from the Harlem Renaissance, co-edited by Wallace Thurman; and Black Fire, compiled by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal during the Black Arts Movement—Peterson traces a genealogy of the coterie anthology as a politically charged genre. He reveals how Black American writers and editors, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, reappropriated and reconfigured this type of anthology format from white modernists.

Ultimately, The Image and the Fire positions the coterie anthology as a site of aesthetic and ideological contestation, one through which marginalized literary communities engaged in acts of cultural self-definition, canon revision, and formal innovation. By foregrounding the coterie anthology’s role in shaping a hybrid American modernism, Peterson contributes to ongoing conversations in literary studies around race, authorship, and the politics of literary form.

In this encyclopedic work of intellectual history, Philip D. Curtain sought to discover the British image of Africa for the years 1780–1850.

In this encyclopedic work of intellectual history, Philip D. Curtain sought to discover the British image of Africa for the years 1780–1850.

2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

A richly illustrated study of how technical drawing shaped culture in the early United States.

With The Technology of Drawing, Elizabeth Bacon Eager explores the importance of manual skill and graphic literacy in the emergence of American industry, offering readers a new lens through which to view the visual culture of the early United States. Focused on questions of materiality and process, the book traces the development of drawing as a technology and argues for it as an embodied way of thinking and knowing, revealing the significance of such knowledge in the construction of both scientific and social authority. Through close analysis of materials, including construction drawings, mechanical treatises, cartographic surveys, and patent drawings, many of which have never been published before, Eager presents a history of American art focused on materiality and process through the view of the mechanic rather than the fine artist. 

Reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of art historical study to engage objects rarely considered as art, The Technology of Drawing treats the technical image as a site of extraordinary creativity, in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans across the social spectrum negotiated critical concepts of identity, invention, and authorship with a remarkable degree of material intelligence and visual sophistication.