{"product_id":"arresting-development","title":"Arresting Development","description":"\u003cp\u003eMainstream narratives of the graphic novel’s development describe the form’s “coming of age,” its maturation from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. In \u003ci\u003eArresting Development\u003c\/i\u003e, Christopher Pizzino questions these established narratives, arguing that the medium’s history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. Comics and their writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy and the struggles for status that marked their earlier history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMany graphic novelists are intensely aware of both the medium’s troubled past and their own tenuous status in contemporary culture. \u003ci\u003eArresting Development\u003c\/i\u003e presents case studies of four key works-Frank Miller’s \u003ci\u003eBatman: The Dark Knight Returns\u003c\/i\u003e, Alison Bechdel’s \u003ci\u003eFun Home\u003c\/i\u003e, Charles Burns’s \u003ci\u003eBlack Hole\u003c\/i\u003e, and Gilbert Hernandez’s \u003ci\u003eLove and Rockets\u003c\/i\u003e-exploring how their authors engage the problem of comics’ cultural standing. Pizzino illuminates the separation of high and low culture, art and pulp, and sophisticated appreciation and vulgar consumption as continual influences that determine the limits of literature, the status of readers, and the value of the very act of reading.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Texas Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54245573001560,"sku":"9781477309773","price":84.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781477309773_2e73aca3-4520-4815-b716-d97c02f32ef6.jpg?v=1777760119","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/arresting-development","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}