This article is about the narrative genre. For the Christian evangelistic book, see Wordless Book.
Wordless novels flourished in Germany in the 1920s and typically were made using woodcut or similar techniques in an Expressionist style. (Frans Masereel, 25 Images of a Man's Passion, 1918)
The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany.
The wordless novel has its origin in the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice. The first such book was the Belgian Frans Masereel's 25 Images of a Man's Passion, published in 1918. The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man, which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross with He Done Her Wrong. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US.
Following World War II, new examples of wordless novels became increasingly rare, and early works went out of print. Interest began to revive in the 1960s when the American comics fandom subculture came to see wordless novels as prototypical book-length comics. In the 1970s, the example of the wordless novel inspired cartoonists such as Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman to create book-length non-genre comics—"graphic novels". Cartoonists such as Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper took direct inspiration from wordless novels to create wordless graphic novels.
The wordlessnovel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut...
known for his series of wordlessnovels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordlessnovels have influenced the...
d'Ache broached the idea of a "drawn novel" in a letter to the newspaper Le Figaro and started work on a 360-page wordless book (which was never published)...
Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic /eɪˈsiːmɪk/ means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest...
He Done Her Wrong is a wordlessnovel written by American cartoonist Milt Gross and published in 1930. It was not as successful as some of Gross's earlier...
(book), a 1920 wordlessnovel by Frans Masereel The Idea (1932 film), an animated film by Berthold Bartosch based on the Masereel novel "The Idea", a 1976...
Passionate Journey, or My Book of Hours (French: Mon livre d'heures), is a wordlessnovel of 1919 by Flemish artist Frans Masereel. The story is told in 167 captionless...
The Sun The Sun (tarot card), a trump card in the tarot deck The Sun (wordlessnovel), a 1919 book of woodcut prints by Frans Masereel Ash-Shams ("The Sun")...
Spiegelman. The project led to a touring show in 2014 about wordlessnovels called Wordless! with live music by saxophonist Phillip Johnston. Art Spiegelman's...
A wordless picture book or a almost-wordless picture book is a picture book whose narrative is expressed through the illustrations. Wordless picture books...
The City (Weber book), a 1921 book by Max Weber The City (wordlessnovel), a 1925 wordlessnovel by Frans Masereel The City, a 1909 play by Clyde Fitch The...
Song Without Words: A Book of Engravings on Wood is a wordlessnovel of 1936 by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985). Executed in twenty-one wood engravings...
1933 wordlessnovel consisting of thirty wood engravings by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985). It was the fourth of Ward's six wordlessnovels, a genre...
and social issues, such as war and capitalism. He completed over 40 wordlessnovels in his career, and among these, his greatest is generally said to be...
ISBN 978-1-55022-806-9 Canadian artist George Walker published the wordlessnovel The Life and Times of Conrad Black in 2013. Black appeared as a guest...
February 5, 2013. The name of the album comes from Lynd Ward's 1929 wordlessnovel Gods' Man, which was given to James while he was considering recording...
Global Information