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.

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)