“I will run the risk of asserting, that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1856
“I snicker at the neologism [“graphic novel”] first for its insecure pretension — the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a ‘sanitation engineer.’ ”
Daniel Raeburn (author and critic), 2010
Must great literature, by definition, be a slog? Difficult? Dense? Exclusive? Productive (of a more moral, dutiful, obedient citizenry)? And must literature that we readily absorb — that delights, entertains, challenges, changes or affirms us — be considered trash?
Coleridge railed against the novel in 1856, and he certainly wasn’t alone in his views at the time. (Though seriously, sir, if you think that this is the effect on your brain of Jane Eyre, what on earth do you think your opium habit is doing to your mind?) It’s no coincidence that Coleridge lost his cool the same year that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary emerged to great fanfare and an even greater outcry from the ‘Protectors of Morality & Art’.
Why all this panic? What was the novel’s primary flaw in the eyes of its many detractors amongst clergy, social critics and traditional writers? What was the true source of alarm behind all their dark muttering about the decline of reason — and with it, Civilization with a capital “C”?
It was this: by the 19th century a variety of innovations and systemic shifts meant that everyday folks, including women and the burgeoning middle class, were reading for pleasure.
Surely this cheapened Great Literature, which had previously been the exclusive purview of those sufficiently wealthy, privileged and educated to own and read poetry in Latin and Greek. Surely pleasure challenged the social order by leading to the atrophy of moral character, intellectual rigour and the capacity for sustained thought? Surely the novel was a wicked thing because it stirred the imagination and made readers yearn for lives and circumstances different than their God-given lot (not to mention for more novels).
What was the world coming to?
Now let’s consider the disdain Raeburn heaps on graphic novels in 2010, especially as I prepare to lead a study that opens with Alison Bechdel’s 2006 New York Times bestseller, Fun Home, a book which recalled Helen Vendler, the great poetry critic, telling our class at Boston University that “Every time a poet writes about a new place or topic, or brings a new identity to life, it’s like lighting up a part of the map.”
Could it be that Raeburn missed Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus? Serialized from 1980-91, it brought the atrocity of the Holocaust to life to an expanded readership and a new generation, long after most of the world had settled for blaming it all on one country, then turning its back. Maus also centred the topics of scapegoating, complicity and individual and collective responsibility for one another during a decade when then-United States President Reagan refused to speak the name of the virus that escalated dramatically on his watch, ultimately killing nearly 100,000 people, most of them men who had sex with men and injection drug users.
I guess I should mention that in my childhood the only two books my mother ever banned were comic books. First, the Fantastic Four because, she said, The Hulk’s grammar was so bad. And then, an underground comic called Wet Satin that featured women artists writing and drawing about sex. That one I never understood, given that I’d scooped up everything from the diaries of Anaïs Nin to Portnoy’s Complaint from the pile by her bedside.
But perhaps I absorbed some of my mother’s disdain for words with pictures. Because when I visited Alison Bechdel at home in Vermont while she was writing and drawing Fun Home (due to her connection to my then-wife, who was one of the early out lesbian cartoonists and an editor at DC Comics), I was surprised by her fastidiousness — and that of every other person I met during that time who was in some way involved in the comics industry.
It was the beginning of my realising that graphic novelists aren’t just drawing stuff on the backs of napkins. They aren’t illiterate or careless, or just not smart enough to read without pictures. They are creating a new art form that strikes the central nervous system with the immediacy, depth and intimacy of the forms that preceded it. Photos of hands covered the wall of Alison’s study next to where she was drawing one sequence. Pictures of 60s-era clothing; painstaking attention to every historical detail. And novels everywhere!
Discover more about the power of graphic literature and contemporary memoir in Growing Up, Nancy Goldstein’s live online study exploring the 21st Century Bildungsroman, starting on 18 January 2026.
