Wordless novel
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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
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)
Expressionist film and graphics inspired early wordless novels. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920)
Wordless novelists favoured relief printing such as in this wood engraving from Ward's Prelude to a Million Years (1933).
In He Done Her Wrong (1930), Milt Gross parodied Lynd Ward's Gods' Man (1929).
25 Images of a Man's Passion
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25 Images of a Man's Passion, or The Passion of a Man is the first wordless novel by Flemish artist Frans Masereel, first published in 1918 under the French title 25 images de la passion d'un homme. T
Wordless novel
…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…
The story parallels that of Ernst Toller's The Transformation. Pictured: a production of The Transformation on 30 September 1919
Frans Masereel Die Passion Eines Menschen 8
Frans Masereel Die Passion Eines Menschen 24
Frans Masereel Die Passion Eines Menschen 25