Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger's unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger's resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children's books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher.

In this book, Series Q editor Michael Moon turns his attention to the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. Since then the work has become famous, but Darger himself has generally been seen as a withdrawn outsider artist whose work may have been the result of mental illness. Moon provides a contrasting view of a creative and gifted artist very responsive to the world around him, showing how Darger drew on novels, comics, pulps, and the history of his time to produce a sometimes disturbing and sometimes joyful but always imaginative alternative world.

About the Author

Michael Moon is Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. He is the author of Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. His books, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol; Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (edited with Cathy N. Davidson); and Displacing Homophobia (edited with Ronald Butters and John M. Clum), are also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"Darger's Resources is a masterful, witty, and moving contribution to Americanist scholarship. It is also an important book, one which will significantly alter the terms of Darger criticism in art history and expand the vocabulary of queer theory in an urgently needed way. Michael Moon links the practice of recuperating texts from punishing or pathologizing interpretations to a context based more on class and religion than on sexuality. In doing so, he provides a model of how to export some of the best innovations of queer studies to other cultural and historical terrain. Moon uses his recuperation of Darger to open up vistas of working-class cultural history."-Christopher Nealon, author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall
"Darger's Resources is an important, lively, and moving book. As he did when writing about Joseph Cornell in his book A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon takes a difficult figure, this time the rather Cornellish Darger, and refuses to demonize him or normalize him."-Carol Mavor, author of Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott
"In Darger's Resources, author Michael Moon (who also penned the tome Displacing Homophobia) puts Darger's art in perspective, demonstrating how it was influenced and inspired by other creative works of the times, including comic strips, pulp fiction, and illustrated children's' books (especially Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz books) and freeing us up to appreciate Darger's work without worrying about our own moral compass." -- Diane Anderson-Minshall * The Advocate *
"Michael Moon... convincingly places the writer's vivid, imaginary worlds alongside those of other such fantasists as L. Frank Baum and H.P. Lovecraft. In the process, Moon upends conventional suspicions about lifelong loner Darger that critics, when considering the scenes of violence and at times oddly sexualized girls he depicts, have read into his art." * Johns Hopkins Magazine *
"Moon is a pioneer in this revisionist study, first by revealing how the dark recesses of proletarian print culture can shed light on Darger's gory and elegiac art (and vice versa), and second by his use of nuanced queer perspectives to further elucidate intersections between sexuality, class, and religion in Darger's writings." -- Leisa Rundquist * Journal of American Studies *
"This volume by Moon (Emory Univ.) is as singular as the art and narrative it explores. . . . Moon's slim monograph adds a recuperative and redemptive perspective to critical conversations swirling around Darger's oeuvre and its reception. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty." -- B. L. Herman * Choice *
"[A] fascinating study. . . . Through the extreme example of Darger, Moon shows us the ways in which Americans can seemingly piece together new personal narratives and create alternative textual realities through varied print cultures. . . ." -- Paige Gray * Journal of American Culture *
"Moon's nuanced, insightful, and compassionate interpretations of gender expression are exemplary. . . . We can all admire Moon's imperative to redeem Darger from the pathologizing interpretations of the past." -- Miguel de Baca * CAA Reviews *
"Moon transcends the conventional reading of Henry Darger as outsider artist or sexual deviant to focus on the ways he borrowed from the polyglot landscape of US working-class culture-from comics and film to advertisements and newspaper articles. Moon argues that Darger provides us with the tools for thinking about working-class artists who produce without the tools and tutelage of elite arts institutions." -- Jennifer Glaser * American Literature *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822351566
Author Michael Moon
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 327g