Lynd Ward's Wordless Novels, 1929-1937

This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905-1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group - much like Beethoven's piano sonatas or Keats's great odes - in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward's novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.

Grant F. Scott is a Professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and author of The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (1994). He has also edited Selected Letters of John Keats (2002), Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs (2005) and The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842-1843 (2016), and co-edited, with Sue Brown, New Letters from Charles Brown to Joseph Severn (2010).

Introduction: Origins Chapter 1: The Silent Film, the Sketch and the Portrait in Gods' Man (1929) Chapter 2: Colonial Legacy and the Crime of Scholarship in Madman's Drum (1930) Chapter 3: Lynching, Labor and Homoeroticism in Wild Pilgrimage (1932) Chapter 4: Disobedient Persuasions: Prelude to a Million Years (1933) Chapter 5: The Limits of Allegory: Song Without Words (1936) and Hymn for the Night (ca. 1940) Chapter 6: The Duplicity of the Word in Vertigo (1937) Epilogue: Dance of the Hours; or, Lynd Ward's Last Unfinished Wordless Novel (2001)