Darger's ResourcesDuke University Press, 2012 M03 12 - 151 pages Henry Darger (1892–1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger's unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger's resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children's books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher. |
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Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Dargers Book of Martyrs | 25 |
Rotten Truths Wasted Lives Spoiled Collections Dargers Work and the Brontës Juvenilia | 43 |
Abduction Adoption Appropriation Darger and the Early Newspaper Comic Strip or Reading Around in the Ruins of a Proletarian Public Sphere | 79 |
Weird Flesh Worlds Flesh Darger and the Pulps | 101 |
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abduction adoption adult American Folk Art Angria appears artist atrocity body Bonesteel Branwell Brontë Branwell's Catholic characters Charlotte Brontë child childhood collaged comic strips Cthulhu Cthulhu Mythos culture Darger's writing death decades depicts desire erotic fantasy fascination feature feel female figure flesh Gein Gein's Glandelinian H. P. Lovecraft Henry Darger highly Ibid images imagine intense Jennie Anges Jennie Richee juvenilia kind Kiyoko Lerner least Little Annie Rooney little girls Little Orphan Annie living Lovecraft MacGregor male martyr martyrdom mass massacre masturbating mother mourning Mutt and Jeff narrative newspaper comic strips novel paintings Patrick Branwell Brontë photograph play popular proletarian public sphere Psycho pulp fiction pulp history pulp magazines readers Realms Saint scenes Schloeder Seabury Quinn sequel serial killer sexual siblings sister social sometimes story superhero tion torture toy soldiers twentieth century Unreal viewers virgin visual Vivian Girls weird young Zamorna