Begone “Pow!”, “Zap!” and “SHAZAM!”: The Consecration of the Graphic Novel

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2020-11-04
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en
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This thesis researches the professional reception of graphic novels and uses Bourdieu’s field theory to determine whether the graphic novel’s position in the literary field has changed since the 1980s, when the term “graphic novel” was popularised. In order to research this, Linders and Op de Beek’s model is applied to twenty-eight graphic novel reviews in newspapers from the 2000s and 2010s to determine which evaluation criteria critics use to review graphic novels. Additionally, the number of words of each review, the backgrounds of the critics, and their comments on the graphic novel medium are analysed. This thesis concludes that the graphic novel medium has moved from a position that denotes a very low degree of consecration (before the 1980s) towards a position of higher consecration in the literary field and that a few graphic novelists have achieved an even higher degree of consecration than the medium as a whole.
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