Memory Spaces

Focusing on six Jewish comics artists across borders, Victoria Aarons adroitly demonstrates how those storytellers variously negotiate memory and identity though their dexterous interplay of text and image. With original insights and writerly aplomb, Aarons has crafted a must-read contribution to the literature on contemporary women graphic novelists.

~Samantha Baskind, Distinguished Professor of Art History, Cleveland State University, and Coeditor of the Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches

This is a richly textured account of Jewish women graphic novelists who engender traumatic memories in the body. Victoria Aarons's focus on the materiality of graphic narratives revisions the comic medium as a site of bodily exposure. She beautifully captures the anxieties of Jewish identity in graphic form.

~Ken Koltun-Fromm, Author of Drawing on Religion: Reading and the Moral Imagination in Comics and Graphic Novels

Victoria Aarons's Memory Spaces breaks new ground in the study of graphic novels. Focusing on the work of six twenty-first-century Jewish women graphic novelists, the author brilliantly discusses the distinctive contribution of gendered writing, showing how each of the six writes in the shadow of various periods of the Jewish historical experience, utilizing visual culture to express what it means to be Jewish and a woman, to be shaped by and yet transcend the past. The relationship between memory and identity emerges with crystal clarity.

~Alan Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies