Visual Storytelling in the 21st Century

This volume will explore varying contemporary strategies and examples of visual storytelling across several contemporary spheres: from street art to video games, from media for children to media for adults, from images in movement to static images.It reads these storytelling venues in terms of the ethical itineraries that we live by, or would like to live by, or wish the world lived by. In this sense it relates to the fact that the term “narrative” has become a ubiquitous shorthand for discursive dominance. Observers of widely varying aspects of social life talk, for example, of changing the narrative, claiming the narrative, overhauling the narrative, or owning the narrative. While these general contexts are well known, there remains a need to continually interrogate new examples of storytelling forms, new cases of the uses of stories in differing formats, and new stories in general. This perpetual need is what this volume aims to respond to by way of its mixture of contemporary storytelling locations and exemplars.

David Callahan is Associate Professor in Department of Languages & Cultures at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. He has previously published one monograph, Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital (2009), and has edited Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature (2002), Australia: Who Cares? (2007), and Body & Text: Cultural Transformations in New Media Environments (Springer, 2019).