The emergence of mass culture in nineteenth-century America was significantly shaped by the Yellow Kid, a pioneering comic character featured in Sunday supplements. While comics predated this era, the rise of full-color illustrations in major city papers and the introduction of weekly extra sections transformed them into a staple of American consumerism. The Yellow Kid's popularity marked a pivotal moment in the evolution of comics, highlighting their role in shaping public entertainment and culture during this transformative period.
War & Trauma Images in Vietnam War Representations juxtaposes American and Vietnamese fictional texts about the war in Vietnam in order to explore the functions and effects of verbal images. Identifying the functionalizations of verbal images in the respective texts, the author then relates the findings to a broader set of questions about perception and mediation, and practices of cultural codification. The author provides a balanced account and in-depth discussion of these interrelated issues, and thus presents a book that is a useful tool for students and lecturers alike. Meyer argues that the writers with their fictions do not only offer critical assessments of the phenomena of de-realizing the war into media (mediatized) events; they also confront readers with ideologically saturated views on reading and interpreting the war, the conceptual matrix/ces, as it were, within which the war (and its – visual – memory) is located. This penetrating new work will help readers to understand the complex relations between war, trauma, and practices/processes of representation and cultural codification. Christina Meyer is an assistant professor in the English Department/American Studies at the Carl v. Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany.
