Comics and other graphic narratives powerfully represent embodied experiences that are difficult to express in language. A group of authors from various countries and disciplines explore the unique capacity of graphic narratives to represent human embodiment as well as the relation of human bodies to the worlds they inhabit. Using works from illustrated scientific texts to contemporary comics across national traditions, we discover how the graphic narrative can shed new light on everyday expe...

Portugal's vibrant comics scene originated as early as the 19th century, bringing forth brilliant individual artists, but has remained mostly unknown beyond Portugal’s borders to this day. Now a new generation employs this medium to put into question hegemonic views on the economy, politics, and society. Following the experience of the financial crisis of the past decades and its impact on social policies, access to and rules of public discourse, and civil strife, comics have questioned wha...

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks t...

This study researches the intricate relationships between poems, empathy and anymals (a term chosen to highlight the diversity of nonhuman animals) in an effort to move beyond the traditional binaries of ‘human vs animal’, ‘projection vs empathy’ and ‘text vs world’. This is done by analysing carefully selected ‘zoopoems’, poems in which anymals take part as protagonists, and exploring the poets’ use of tools and techniques to confront traditional binaries. Through these zoo...