Darger's Resources

Michael Moon

Published by Duke University Press 2012

Darger's Resources

Michael Moon

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394891

Overview
Contents

About this book

Moon turns his attention to the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. Since then the work has become famous, but Darger himself has generally been seen as a withdrawn outsider artist whose work may have been the result of mental illness. Moon provides a contrasting view of a creative and gifted artist very responsive to the world around him.

Author / Editor information

Michael Moon is Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. He is the author of Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. His books, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol; Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (edited with Cathy N. Davidson); and Displacing Homophobia (edited with Ronald Butters and John M. Clum), are also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"Darger's Resources is a masterful, witty, and moving contribution to Americanist scholarship. It is also an important book, one which will significantly alter the terms of Darger criticism in art history and expand the vocabulary of queer theory in an urgently needed way. Michael Moon links the practice of recuperating texts from punishing or pathologizing interpretations to a context based more on class and religion than on sexuality. In doing so, he provides a model of how to export some of the best innovations of queer studies to other cultural and historical terrain. Moon uses his recuperation of Darger to open up vistas of working-class cultural history."—Christopher Nealon, author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall

"Darger's Resources is an important, lively, and moving book. As he did when writing about Joseph Cornell in his book A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon takes a difficult figure, this time the rather Cornellish Darger, and refuses to demonize him or normalize him."—Carol Mavor, author of Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott

“In Darger's Resources, author Michael Moon (who also penned the tome Displacing Homophobia) puts Darger’s art in perspective, demonstrating how it was influenced and inspired by other creative works of the times, including comic strips, pulp fiction, and illustrated children's' books (especially Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz books) and freeing us up to appreciate Darger’s work without worrying about our own moral compass.”

-- Diane Anderson-Minshall The Advocate

“Michael Moon... convincingly places the writer's vivid, imaginary worlds alongside those of other such fantasists as L. Frank Baum and H.P. Lovecraft. In the process, Moon upends conventional suspicions about lifelong loner Darger that critics, when considering the scenes of violence and at times oddly sexualized girls he depicts, have read into his art.”

-- Johns Hopkins Magazine

“Moon is a pioneer in this revisionist study, first by revealing how the dark recesses of proletarian print culture can shed light on Darger’s gory and elegiac art (and vice versa), and second by his use of nuanced queer perspectives to further elucidate intersections between sexuality, class, and religion in Darger’s writings.”

-- Leisa Rundquist Journal of American Studies

“This volume by Moon (Emory Univ.) is as singular as the art and narrative it explores. . . . Moon's slim monograph adds a recuperative and redemptive perspective to critical conversations swirling around Darger's oeuvre and its reception. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.”

-- B. L. Herman Choice

“[A] fascinating study. . . . Through the extreme example of Darger, Moon shows us the ways in which Americans can seemingly piece together new personal narratives and create alternative textual realities through varied print cultures. . . .”

-- Paige Gray Journal of American Culture

“Moon’s nuanced, insightful, and compassionate interpretations of gender expression are exemplary. . . . We can all admire Moon’s imperative to redeem Darger from the pathologizing interpretations of the past.”

-- Miguel de Baca CAA Reviews

"Moon transcends the conventional reading of Henry Darger as outsider artist or sexual deviant to focus on the ways he borrowed from the polyglot landscape of US working-class culture—from comics and film to advertisements and newspaper articles. Moon argues that Darger provides us with the tools for thinking about working-class artists who produce without the tools and tutelage of elite arts institutions."

-- Jennifer Glaser American Literature

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Darger’s Book of Martyrs Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter 2. Rotten Truths, Wasted Lives, Spoiled Collections: Darger’s Work and the Brontës’ Juvenilia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
Chapter 3. Abduction, Adoption, Appropriation: Darger and the Early Newspaper Comic Strip; or, Reading Around in the Ruins of a Proletarian Public Sphere Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
Chapter 4. Weird Flesh, World’s Flesh: Darger and the Pulps Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 176
Illustrations
- Other: 8 illustrations, incl. 5 in color

eBook

Published: March 12, 2012
ISBN: 9780822394891