Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory gathers an international team of contributors from two continents who demonstrate through their innovative scholarship that they regard comics and graphic novels as works of art in their own right. Their contributions serve as scholarly models and prototypes for further research that can continue to define the relationship between comics and other accepted high art forms, such as literature and the visual arts. As this collection demonstrates, critics worldwide have begun taking comics and graphic novels seriously, and have increasingly secured the place of German comics and graphic novels in a globalized culture of comics. A wealth of secondary literature exists both in German and English that aims to locate comics and graphic novels within contexts of narrative theory, literary theory, and media studies. In addition to those, a number of monographs and anthologies have also appeared in recent years that collect pedagogical studies and literary analyses of graphic texts. Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics: History, Pedagogy, Theory is the first English-language anthology that exclusively focuses on graphic texts of the German-speaking countries. Thus, in its breadth, this book functions as an important resource in a to-date limited pool of critical works on German-language comics and graphic novels. The individual contributions in this book differ significantly from one another in methodology, subject matter, and style. Taken together, however, they present a cross-section of comics and graphic novel scholarship being performed in North America and in Europe. The contributors to this volume have directly confronted the challenge to sort out the E und U (ernsthaft, or serious versus. Unterhaltung or entertainment) that still often enters public discourse in today s German-speaking world today. The intellectual innovations, in which the contributors reorganize and reconfigure conventional prototypes of reading literature and observing visual art, have the potential to create a new critical language within which this rapidly expanding genre can be read and interpreted."