• Skip to content
  • Skip to footer
  • Accessibility options
University of Brighton
  • About us
  • Business and
    employers
  • Alumni and
    supporters
  • For
    students
  • For
    staff
  • Accessibility
    options
Open menu
Home
Home
  • Close
  • Study here
    • Meet us
    • Open days
    • Virtual tours
    • Upcoming events
    • Applicant days
    • Meet us in your country
    • Chat to our students
    • Ask us a question
    • Order a prospectus
    • Our campuses
    • Our four campuses
    • Accommodation options
    • Our halls
    • Helping you find a home
    • What you can study
    • Find a course
    • Full A-Z course list
    • Explore our subjects
    • Our academic departments
    • How to study with us
    • Undergraduate application process
    • Postgraduate application process
    • International student application process
    • Apprenticeships
    • Applying through Clearing
    • Transfer from another university
    • Fees and financial support
    • Undergraduate finance
    • Postgraduate finance
    • Our funding and support options
    • Supporting you
    • Your wellbeing
    • Student support and guidance tutors
    • Study skills support
    • Careers and employability
  • Research
    • Research and knowledge exchange
    • Research and knowledge exchange organisation
    • The Global Challenges
    • Centres of Research Excellence (COREs)
    • Research Excellence Groups (REGs)
    • Our research database
    • Information for business
    • Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD research disciplines and programmes
    • PhD funding opportunities and studentships
    • How to apply for your PhD
    • Research environment
    • Investing in research careers
    • Strategic plan
    • Research concordat
    • News, events, publications and films
    • Featured research and knowledge exchange projects
    • Research and knowledge exchange news
    • Inaugural lectures
    • Research and knowledge exchange publications and films
    • Academic staff search
  • About us
  • Business and employers
  • Alumni, supporters and giving
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • Accessibility
Search our site
Hand drawn field of poppies with large poppy to right. Characters from the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow walk through it, created from puppets. Illustration by Graham Rawle for his 2009 edition of The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum.
Research and knowledge exchange
  • Postgraduate research degrees
  • Research features
  • Research organisation
  • Research environment
  • Research features
    • Research features
    • Films and publications
    • News
    • project-archive
    • R&E Newsletters
  • Features
    • Features
    • Blood pressure targets for the very elderly: preventing strokes and heart attacks in the over 80s
    • Brighton Waste House
    • Cannibalism in early humans: the calorific significance of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic era
    • Childhood asthma and eczema treatment: a personalised approach
    • Coexistence with carnivores: how do we better understand inter-relationships between humans and wild carnivores?
    • Communities of Practice and Value Creation Frameworks: how do we learn from each other?
    • Crowd safety: revolutionising crowd management through a better understanding of the psychology of crowds
    • Delayed umbilical cord clamping: research into the health benefits to babies
    • Design history research: how we help to develop a greater understanding of our global cultural heritage
    • Diabetes patient care: providing life-saving therapy and improved quality of life
    • Faecal-borne diseases: research provides life-saving advances in disease control
    • Food recycling: waste solutions through city-scale food recycling policy are developed and tested in China
    • Football4Peace...Rugby4Peace: how sport is bringing intercultural cooperation to communities in conflict
    • Graphic novel research: changing attitudes to reading and publishing
    • Hepatitis C: eliminating the virus among vulnerable communities of drug users and homeless people
    • Heritage technology: helping to augment museum collections and enliven cultural engagement
    • Humanitarian business: our innovation strategy is helping disaster-affected third world relief funds
    • Inclusive arts practice: reaching new understandings of what is truly inclusive
    • LGBTI health care: challenging and improving the inequality in care
    • Liver disease research: medical device innovation and commercialisation to combat liver disease
    • ONSIDE teacher mentoring: re-envisioning mentoring to promote professional development and wellbeing
    • Our research impact
    • Photography research: visualising history from the margins
    • Physiotherapy private practice: raising standards across the UK
    • Politics and arts: how media and visual communication can bring about social and political change
    • Practice-led research: developing the impact of research conducted through art and design practice
    • PrefHER: putting patient choice and preferences at the forefront of breast cancer management
    • Research impact
    • Resilience for social justice: research is bringing an inclusive revolution in mental health
    • Screen archives: fostering audiences for our shared film heritage through archive development and research
    • Sexual health research: understanding HIV and improving health among men who have sex with men
    • Sports science: protecting the health of Paralympic, Olympic and World Cup competitors
    • Stonehenge, where were the stones from? Geochemical fingerprinting research reveals origins of the sarsen stones
    • Street triage and mental health: giving a voice to those in crisis
    • Superfused Brighton: research into how creative and media innovation drives the digital economy
    • Sustainable tourism: collaborative research methodologies to transform the tourism sector
    • The Design Archives: international collections bring partners on board and develop innovative engagement
    • The Shakespeare Hut: forgotten and marginalised histories of theatre heritage
    • Can stress cause cancer? Research examines the relationship between stress and cancer
    • Urban agriculture research: increasing food production for city sustainability
    • Water supply research: providing better, cleaner, cheaper water
  • Graphic novel research: changing attitudes to reading and publishing

Graphic novel research: changing attitudes to reading and publishing

Graphic novelist and experimental fiction designer Graham Rawle has revolutionised literary practices through his meticulously crafted works, each a practice-led research experiment which tests the boundaries of readership, publishing and the possibilities of narrative. 

Famous for his 'Lost consonants' in The Guardian and a string of highly valued experimental graphic novels, his work in print and, more recently, in film, has brought new attitudes within the publishing and cinema industries, changed public readership practices and underpinned new creative experiences for teachers and learners across the creative storytelling disciplines. 

PhD in graphic art and experimental narrative? Find out more about opportunities in art and creative practice with the University of Brighton.

Graham Rawle’s experimental multimodal literature and design research has revolutionised diverse creative industry sectors internationally, including fiction, comic illustration, graphic novels, music and film, to produce a new way of storytelling. 

He has prompted editors and publishing houses to reconsider their strategies around popular forms of fiction. Challenging the role of readership, materials, form and content, his work has become embedded within higher education creative writing programmes internationally, while consistently challenging readers to rethink how they read, absorb and learn from novels. A long-time tutor at the University of Brighton, Graham Rawle's ingenuity and enthusiasm for narrative experiment have been passed onto hundreds of successful graduates of the internationally respected Masters in Sequential Design/Illustration, a course which he and Margaret Huber developed and expanded after its initial creation by Bruce Brown, John Vernon Lord and George Hardie in 1989.

Graham Rawle has developed innovative techniques in multimodality, involving the interplay between text and image (or text as image) as a way to carry an additional narrative dimension that is neither written nor illustrated, but which emerges through the combined reading of both.  

This has resulted in the production of experimental novels that include Woman’s World (2005), The Card (2012) and Overland (2018). Though the designs and layouts differ from book to book according to the characteristics of the story, each work challenges literary traditions by using visual elements to create sub-textual indicators within the narrative. These engender particularly intense reader experiences through the enhanced visualisation that is possible, in particular for the narrative ‘voice’, the dramatic mood or the geographical space.  

Black and white image of Graham Rawle cutting a strip of words from a magazine.

A page of collaged text. largely in black and white newsprint but with New Shoes in blue and reverse type respectively. Graham Rawle's original artwork material from Womans World.

Graphic narrative researcher Graham Rawle's novel, Woman's World, has changed the understanding of how texts are read 

Woman’s World is a 437-page novel collaged entirely from fragments of text clipped from the pages of vintage women’s magazines; these clippings are reassembled to tell the 1962 story of Roy and ‘sister’ Norma’s struggle to live up to the prescribed ideals of feminine perfection. The method of assembly illustrates Norma’s constructed persona and her dependence on the magazines to find her female voice. The metafictional use of real magazines allows characters to be realised and immerses the reader within an original contextual backdrop, magnifying the novel’s questions about sexism, stereotypes, sexuality and social standards as the appropriated material tells its own social, historical and cultural story.

Graham Rawle has won wide critical acclaim through reviews in over 70 international press publications, with Woman’s World being described by Neel Mukherjee in The Times as: ‘a work of genius […] the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ The recontextualizing of existing material in Woman’s World (2005) highlights the main themes of the narrative: gender stereotyping and the prescribed paradigm of femininity as portrayed onscreen in the 1950s and ‘60s.  By playing with perceptions of gender, consumerism and society through its creative methodologies the novel considers constraints of both stereotyping and the novel form. raising important questions about gender construction. 

The Card, one of three novels shortlisted for the 2013 Writers' Guild Best Book Award, required a different visual approach to reflect the protagonist’s thought patterns. Here, the page design makes use of typographic anomalies, and a series of coded graphic symbols that sit in the margins alongside the text. These act as a narrative visual shorthand that highlights the protagonist’s mental condition, apophenia (or ‘patternicity’), which manifests itself in a tendency to perceive, mistakenly, meaningful connections between unrelated things. 

 

Hardback and paperback covers of Graham Rawle's Womans World, respectively a collage of 50s magazine imagery forming a puppet-like woman in a kitchen carrying a plate of meat and veg. A 50s red shoe crossing a black and white photograph of rainy pavement.

Back cover of Graham Rawle's Woman's World. A diverse set of collaged texts reads There was a giddy knot in my stomach and my heart was skipping madly to the beat of Jack Costanzo's Cha Cha Bongo. These are the sensations that spring from being young and

Graham Rawle's experimental graphic novel, Woman's World, brought collaged, 'found text' to the draft narrative, forcing unexpected choices as to phrasing, style and the story. The resulting novel has given readers and critics a new understanding of the process and visuality of text. [top to bottom: Graham Rawle 'writing with scissors', cutting his found text from magazines; a page of collaged text;hardback and softback covers of Woman's World; a panel from the back cover of the novel showing the visual interplay of image and text on the page.]

 

 

Graham Rawle's experimental graphic novels tackle research questions as to how books are read and how narratives function 

In Overland, Rawle’s research into visual innovation reflects the overall shape of the narrative, as the central themes of heaven and hell are conveyed through the book’s innovative layout. Designed to be read with its spine aligned horizontally, its parallel alternating narratives unravel simultaneously above and below the book’s spine, orientating the reader spatially within a narrative in which characters and their stories migrate between the bright utopian world of ‘Overland’ and the dark underworld of industry and war. As in Rawle’s previous books, the unexpected format and narrative delivery challenges expectations of how literary fiction should be read, a reader experience that stems from Graham Rawle's experimental research into the potential of the format to tell this specific story.

These works of fiction and practice-led graphic narrative research collectively demonstrate Rawle’s theory that the visuality of the text, when tailored to the aims of specific story, can create a significant added narrative complexity. 

 

A book cover designed horizontally. Upper and lower halves show a 1940s American rural idyll in poster style, with a bomber flying overhead. The lower half a black and white image of factory machinery. Title reads Overland Graham Rawle.

Graham Rawle's novel Overland was in part a research experiment which challenged the conventions of readership. It is designed to be read horizontally, with narratives set overland and underground occupying top and bottom of the page and text being visible through the fine paper.

Graham Rawle has extended his experimental narrative research into the medium of film using collaged, layered clips

Rawle is now bringing these insights and strategies to moving image. The making of the Woman’s World film recycles audiovisual clips to create a narratively fluent film collage. The same methodology is used and clips are sourced, catalogued and archived to allow a version of the original story to be assembled. Unlike other leading contemporary ‘found footage’ filmmakers, Rawle uses a unique process whereby live action film is digitally cut and pasted both sequentially and spatially, so that each single frame might be composed from as many as 15 cut-out and layered film clips. The outcome can thus be viewed as somewhere between a traditional film and a moving collage. No film has ever been created in this way before. This ground-breaking methodology furthers Rawle’s ongoing research into the practice and theory of narrative, continuity, montage and sequence.  

Through the meticulous re-composition of existing film footage his process tests the boundaries of narrative coherence revealing new insights into the perceived importance of established conventions in editing and audience comprehension. It examines the participatory role of the audience, playing on their natural propensity to ‘find’ a narrative thread. Rawle’s film demonstrates that discontinuity in spatial geography, costume, setting etc (once considered prohibitively obstructive to narrative flow) can be made acceptable to an audience so long as the narrative drive is strong, the dramatic intent of the scene remains stable, and a character’s emotional state is changed only by a tangible catalyst.

Film still title of in-progress experimental film Woman's World by Graham Rawle. Black and white capture shows words Woman's World repurposed from two different films with contrasting fonts.

The success of the experimental novel Woman's World drew Graham Rawle to a complementary experiment in the medium of film, digitally pasting layered film clips to extend the notion of narratives being shaped through found material and encouraging new understanding of the potential of film.

Graphic narrative research by Graham Rawle has had an impact on readers, publishers and creative practices internationally

Rawle’s experimental artistic practices have affected different layers of culture, education, publishing and creative industries across different countries and settings. Creative artists from a wide range of disciplines have cited Rawle’s works and methods as a key influence on their practice, enabling them to test new methods in their own experimental work. Public attention is regularly drawn to Rawle’s novels as they have been widely reviewed in the media. His innovative methods have also had a significant cross-disciplinary impact on the teaching of both design and creative writing. Over 40 educational textbooks draw on this work to teach methods across disparate themes and disciplines. 

The production of these works, and the response received by the public, has led the publishing director at Chatto & Windus to say that these works remain ‘the gold standard for how to bring art into storytelling’ and have brought together the editorial and production functions in the business, which is rare for the publishing industry.  The CEO of US publisher Cursor goes on to say that: ‘Books like Rawle’s do not merely inspire artists and writers; they make it possible for publishers to publish forms that had not been hitherto published. It is a testament to the astonishing creativity of Graham Rawle that he has devised exactly that’.

 

 

Front cover of Graham Rawle's Diary of an Amateur Photographer. Collage image of composite photographs shows body of a seated woman in short dress and stockings, against a domestic interior with multiple heads across shoulders. Title in collage letters.
Back to top
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn icon

Contact us

University of Brighton
Mithras House
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4AT

Main switchboard 01273 600900

Course enquiries

Sign up for updates

University contacts

Report a problem with this page

Quick links Quick links

  • Courses
  • Open days
  • Order a prospectus
  • Academic departments
  • Academic staff
  • Professional services departments
  • Jobs
  • Privacy and cookie policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Libraries
  • Term dates
  • Maps
  • Graduation
  • Site information
  • Online shop
  • COVID-19
  • The Student Contract

Information for Information for

  • Current students
  • International students
  • Media/press
  • Careers advisers/teachers
  • Parents/carers
  • Business/employers
  • Alumni/supporters
  • Suppliers
  • Local residents