Abstract

Literature offers boys and men relevant insights into masculinities,their various contextually informed male identities, and useful opportunities to improve their literacy skills. Writing about literature and writing through literature productively involve boys and men in answering textually centered analytic- and socially relevant critical-literacy questions—both crucial inquiries for understanding themselves and for honing their learning strategies. Male-positive literacy provides males accessible means to literacy achievement and alternatives to persistent stereotypical, negative discursive constructions and representations of boys and men as readers and writers. Graphic novels promote-male positive literacy through their engaging, yet self-reflexive use of narrative tropes familiar to and of interest to males. After defining male positive and describing what male-positive literacy entails; this paper explores how graphic novels might promote this literacy and reports on how effectively two graphic novels, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s 300 and John McDonald’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s King Henry V, contributed to enabling nineteen men to experience male-positive literacy in a college-level Men-in-Literature course.