Dr Laurence Grove, M.A., PhD.
Senior Lecturer, French
Head of French
Director, Centre for Emblem Studies
Teaching:
General non-Honours teaching; Honours options on Bande Dessinée and on Emblems; postgraduate teaching on Critical theory (from Freud to Fraud)
Research interests:
The present literary epoch has been of exceptional duration: 400 years. There are many symptoms that it is at an end. The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from the new stress on visual-auditory communication. (Marshall McLuhan)
Dr Grove's research activities centre upon word/image interaction from the early days of printing onwards. He is interested in the technical conditions that led to the success of hybrid forms, particularly the emblem book (and related material) in the Early Modern period, and the bande dessinée today. In some respects he sees his work as an attempt to update and 'Frenchify' the ideas of Theodor Holm Nelson and Marshall McLuhan.
More specifically, in the field of emblematics Dr Grove has provided a bibliography of secondary sources for The French Emblem (Droz, 2000, with Daniel Russell) and in Emblematics and Seventeenth-Century French Literature (EMF, 2000) he underlines the way in which an applied knowledge of the subject can increase understanding of the works of mainstream authors of the period. In related studies he has presented and analysed 'lost' texts by Tristan L'Hermite and Charles Perrault. Dr Grove is Director of the Centre for Emblem Studies and General Editor of Glasgow Emblem Studies, having in particular edited the volume Emblems in the Manuscript Tradition.
Following his work on the Glasgow manuscript of Tristan's emblematic poems, Dr Grove has devoted more time to the quirky poet and is now Vice President of Les Amis de Tristan L'Hermite and a member of the comité de rédaction for the Cahiers Tristan L'Hermite. He was heavily involved in the Célébrations Nationales for the four-hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth (2001) and was part of the editing team for his Oeuvres complètes (Champion, 1999 onwards).
Bande Dessinée: subsequent to the 1999 and 2001 Glasgow International Bande Dessinée Conferences, Dr Grove has published several articles and co-edited The Francophone Bande Dessinée (Rodopi, 2005). He is President of IBDS, an international society for the study of the BD. IBDS is in the process of launching an international journal, European Comic Art (Liverpool University Press), of which he is to be one of the three main editors. His current project is Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée, a general monograph (albeit with a bias towards history) on the subject (forthcoming from Berghahn of Oxford).
Dr Grove is a member of the Advisory Committee for the international e-journal of popular culture Belphégor, and of Textimage, a general e-journal for Text/Image cultures. Recent papers have allowed him to talk about early photography, Barthes and Astérix, rude seventeenth-century poems, Disneyland and Versailles and unfunny Nazi comics. His audience has also been known to contemplate a urinal. Many of the seemingly disparate strings of Dr Grove's research interests are brought together in his fifth book, Text/Image Mosaics (Ashgate, 2005), a work that compares the theory, production, themes and reception of text/image forms in the Early Modern and Modern periods.
Supervisory areas:
Any area of text/image culture, specifically emblematics and bande dessinée or graphic novels
Laurence Grove - List of Publications
Laurence Grove - CV