Comics of the New Europe : Reflections and Intersections

Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and Communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under Communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences.

Contributors: Max Bledstein (University of Winnipeg), Dragana Obradović (University of Toronto), Aleksandra Sekulic (University of Arts in Belgrade), Pavel Kořínek (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague), Martin Foret (Palacký University), Michael Scholz (Uppsala University), Sean Eedy (Carleton University), Elizabeth Nijdam (University of British Columbia), Ewa Stańczyk (University of Amsterdam), Eszter Szép (Eötvös Loránd University)

Martha Kuhlman is professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University.

José Alaniz is professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.