Reading bande dessinee: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip

This book is for students of French-language comic strip, or bande dessinée, and for more general readers. It is divided into four sections, which offer four different ways of approaching the medium, associated with different theoretical perspectives. Frameworks for analysis are made very explicit, and no prior knowledge of terminology is assumed.

The first part offers a historical overview, with the longest and most detailed section being devoted to contemporary bande dessinée, emphasizing the artistic impact of independent publishing houses since the 1990s. The history of the medium is in part the history of its struggle for legitimacy, and each chapter includes a section which considers the evolution of the cultural status of bande dessinée and of the theoretical approaches applied to it.

Keywords: expansion and experimentation, analytical frameworks, cultural studies approach, national indentity