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This thesis examines hybrid novels – novels in which graphic devices like photographs, drawings and experimental typography are integrated into the written text. Within hybrid novels, word and image combine to create a text that is neither purely written, nor purely visual. Although not new, hybrid novels are increasingly appearing in commercial publishing, and increasingly recognised as an insufficiently explained phenomenon by both literary critics and academics. Book reviews and essays show that readers and critics accustomed to conventional novels can find hybrid novels perplexing. They ask: What are these images? What are they doing in novels? How does one ‘read’ them? These questions point to the need for new approaches to the analysis and critique of hybrid texts, approaches that account for the interplay between words and images. This thesis proposes that Visual Communication Designers – those versed in both the verbal and the visual – offer useful analytical tools and critique for the study of hybrid texts. So the research asks: How could a designer’s particular knowledge of wordimage interplay explain the function of graphic devices in hybrid novels? A preliminary study of fifteen hybrid novels develops: criteria for identifying hybrid novels; a typology of graphic devices in hybrid novels – photographs, illustrative elements, unconventional typesetting, ephemera and diagrams; and a set of analytical tools to critique the effectiveness of the graphic devices in hybrid novels. Then, a primary study uses the analytical tools to critique the graphic devices in three exemplar hybrid novels: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Dave Egger’s You Shall Know Our Velocity. This thesis is practice-led in that an issue identified through my design practice led to the research, and analytical and critical tools derived from practice are applied as research methods. The research also draws upon a theoretical framework from the emergent field of Visual Studies, where scholars call for the interdisciplinary study of hybrid texts in a critically acute and widely accessible way. Finally, this thesis is itself a hybrid text; a combination of graphic devices and writing form parts of the argument.

This thesis examines hybrid novels – novels in which graphic devices like photographs, drawings and experimental typography are integrated into the written text. Within hybrid novels, word and image combine to create a text that is neither purely written, nor purely visual. Although not new, hybrid novels are increasingly appearing in commercial publishing, and increasingly recognised as an insufficiently explained phenomenon by both literary critics and academics. Book reviews and essays show that readers and critics accustomed to conventional novels can find hybrid novels perplexing. They ask: What are these images? What are they doing in novels? How does one ‘read’ them? These questions point to the need for new approaches to the analysis and critique of hybrid texts, approaches that account for the interplay between words and images. This thesis proposes that Visual Communication Designers – those versed in both the verbal and the visual – offer useful analytical tools and critique for the study of hybrid texts. So the research asks: How could a designer’s particular knowledge of wordimage interplay explain the function of graphic devices in hybrid novels? A preliminary study of fifteen hybrid novels develops: criteria for identifying hybrid novels; a typology of graphic devices in hybrid novels – photographs, illustrative elements, unconventional typesetting, ephemera and diagrams; and a set of analytical tools to critique the effectiveness of the graphic devices in hybrid novels. Then, a primary study uses the analytical tools to critique the graphic devices in three exemplar hybrid novels: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Dave Egger’s You Shall Know Our Velocity. This thesis is practice-led in that an issue identified through my design practice led to the research, and analytical and critical tools derived from practice are applied as research methods. The research also draws upon a theoretical framework from the emergent field of Visual Studies, where scholars call for the interdisciplinary study of hybrid texts in a critically acute and widely accessible way. Finally, this thesis is itself a hybrid text; a combination of graphic devices and writing form parts of the argument.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2008. Dept. of English. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-131).

This thesis reclaims the analysis of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. It is mindful of analysis of the stereotypical, and partial tendencies of orientalist representations of Satrapi’s work by both Iranian officials and “Western” media and readership. Themes are detected from this analysis and pertain to the message and intention of the author to create her work. The intentio lectoris1 (i.e. what audiences believe or led to believe) proposed that orientalist paradigms present the meaning of the work or Satrapi’s agenda, i.e. the intentio auctoris. Persepolis has been enthusiastically received all around the world, except in Iran. It has been described and interpreted as the critique of a courageous girl against the foundations of the Iranian Islamic Republic. Notwithstanding the success, the graphic novel and the animated movie derived from it in 2007 have been banned by the Iranian government, and subsequently Marjane Satrapi has been refused entry into the country. The polarised reception of Satrapi’s work in Iran and worldwide, is contextualised within (neo) orientalist critique. I detect in these receptions both potentials and problems. Reclaiming aspects of Persepolis’ analysis that have been excluded from and therefore devalued by external agencies is affirmed as a necessary and important contribution. However, I note that the overwhelming reluctance amongst “Western” media and news reporters to speak of Satrapi’s dual and neutral position, or to grasp at specificity her intentio auctoris, prevents us from a thorough discussion of their analysis. Satrapi’s work is ultimately left in the hands of clichés. I attempt to analyse Persepolis in such a way that it not only affirms rationality, fluidity, and duality, but also offers new and beneficial ways to argue Satrapi’s position and intention. My thesis is thus partly rooted in a feminist standpoint perspective to give voice to Satrapi’s agenda. What is more, it converses with similar restrictive regulations and contextualises them within an analysis of selected post-revolutionary autobiographical literature. My ultimate goal is to analyse the Iranian position towards Persepolis by making sense of the theological and political thought of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Revolution, and the concept of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurists) and the national and international responses to it in a way in which to take and transform the representation of Persepolis and Iranian culture consequently. This is done by explaining the current Iranian situation and Iranian responses to internal and external threats. Theological analyses and the explication of some of the historical complexities affecting modern Iran (especially after the revolution) would be beneficial along the way.

This study explores Scott's vision of historical progress and how its impact on various aspects of human life is reflected in his Scottish novels. Central to this study are civic and heroic virtues in the contexts of religion, family, nationalism, politics, economy, law and justice . It falls into an introduction, six chapters and a conclusion. The introduction sets these concerns in the context of Scottish philosophy and history and argues that Scott rejects Burke's absolutism but looks for a more flexible and rational evolution of the institutions and principles that make for social cohesion. The first chapter argues that Scott's historicism is not the product of a mixture of Romantic and Enlightenment attitudes, of sympathy or nostalgia and rationalism or progressivism. Rather it is derived from the so-called "philosophical" historians of the Scottish Enlightenment. For these writers the individualism of modern commercial society had been a problematic development, since unchecked individualism might ultimately undermine social cohesion necessary for all human flourishing. Scott is thus the inheritor of a rationalist, progressive philosophy of history, but one with well-defined reservations about progress and modernity. The second chapter questions the traditional reading of Waverley as a mixture of Romantic nostalgia and Enlightenment skepticism about "primitive" societies. Scott's Highlanders, I argue, function not simply as colourful quasi-Romantic primitives, but as the embodiment of civic and heroic virtues, which renders the novel a Scottish Enlightenment parable on the indispensability of "civic virtue". The third chapter deals with Old Mortality, a novel now often read as a sort of Hobbesian critique of the seventeenth-centut British civil wars. Indeed, the civic virtue of the parties involved in the conflict is displayed in such a light that selfIsh individualism might seem preferable. But on comparing the novel's treatment of the civil wars to that of David Hume's History of England, I show that Old Mortality is a profound meditation on the fundamentally social constitution of human nature, and that it defends rather than belittles public-spiritedness. In the fourth chapter I show how Scott undercuts the political conflict in Rob Roy by reducing it to a sort of clash of cullures which nevertheless share certain values. Using J.G.A. Pocock's seminal work, Virtue, Commerce, and History, I suggest that Scott calls for an updating of civic virtue. Chivalric Honour mutates into Credit to meet commercial needs, and to define social relationships. Also, Scott attempts a synthesis of the otherwise antagonist principles of Burke and Paine concerning family affairs. The virtue of paternal piety, as a cohesive force, is redefined as mutual understanding rather than dictatorship. Scott recognizes the law of inheritance but submits it to civil law. The fifth chapter deals with The Heart of Midlothian. The novel, I argue, gives civic virtue a religious dimension by making it providentially recognized. Skeptical of secular values in establishing the genuine civil society, the novel legitimizes a moral autonomy that derives from rational and progressive religion. Moral autonomy in this sense defines actions of mundane authority in whatever capacity, domestic, political, economical and judicial. Updating religion in one of its aspects, I show, aims at asserting Scottish national and cultural identity, given the fact that historically the Kirk has always been one of its crucial components. On the other hand, the novel attempts to define the tense relationship between Scotland and England within the Union in terms of moral values. Taken in the context of colonization, the novel focuses on vices infiltrating into English commercial society, which in a similar manner are transferred into Scottish society, and threaten the morality of the British nation at large. The sixth chapter on Redgauntlet focuses on Scott's treatment of loyalty as a civic virtue in more than one context. In the context of law and justice, loyalty is modified to operate under the rubric of personal integrity and civil courage. In the political context it is defined in terms of national consensus. In the economic context, it supports advancement as long as it operates within communal interest. The concluding chapter uses Guy Mannering, The Antiquary and The Bride of Lammermoor to support the thesis that Scott's fictional dealings with history in the "Scottish" novels is directed to an accommodation of ancient virtues with present forms of society and nationhood.