The aim of this bibliography is not to list all the items that have been used in our book, but to provide the reader with a mapping of the field and initial advice on what we consider to be essential reading. For the presentation of the material, we will follow as much as possible the three-part structure of our book.

General information (Chapter 1)

As this book has implied throughout, it would be highly artificial and counterproductive to separate too drastically graphic novel studies and comics studies. Graphic novel studies are both an offspring of and a reaction against comics studies, and in many cases a good knowledge of the comics field is simply indispensable for anyone who is interested in the graphic novel. Yet given that the focus of this book is so heavily on the graphic novel alone, it may suffice to mention just some selected titles on comics as a key phenomenon of twentieth-century American culture such as Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (Wildwood House, 1973); Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Temple University Press, 2009); Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds., The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling (Stanford University Press, 2011); and Charles Hatfield, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Two recent surveys of the field are Hillary Chute, “Graphic Narrative,” in Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds., The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012, 407–419); and the Narratologia series, Daniel Stein and Jan Thon, eds., Theory and History of the Graphic Novel (De Gruyter, 2013).