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Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our \"postfeminist\" age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story. The Glass Slipperis about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women's nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today's media, with profound implications for women. More than a book about romance in fiction and media,The Glass Slipperillustrates how traditional stories about women's sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives-historical and contemporary from high literature and \"low\" genres-discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women's magazines, and D. H. Lawrence'sLady Chatterley's Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories. Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women's beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser's goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction r provides an accessible, concise and reliable overview of core critical terminology, key theoretical approaches, and the major genres and sub-genres within popular fiction.

In Les Furtifs, Alain Damasio imagines a near future where cities are reduced to privatized, hyperconnected spaces dominated by the sense of sight. Creatures born of sound, haunting the blind spots of human vision, the furtifs offer a different relationship with the living. ey embrace human movements, communicate through their words, and imbue them with ambiguity, like a rhythmic power that acts within language. In this article, I would like to discuss the poetics of rhythm at work in Damasio’s novel and to what extent this poetics can be thought of as an ecopoetics, that is, an art of renewing our way of perceiving non human nature through work on language.

Academics, researchers and postgraduate students in Contemporary English Literature; Gothic Literature; Children's Literature; Youth and Childhood Studies; Contemporary Popular Culture; Critical Theory.

The Crusades, particularly the First Crusade, have long captivated the imagination of writers and poets in both the Christian West and the Muslim East. This study explores how the First Crusade is narrated and invoked in contemporary literature through a comparative analysis of two novels: The Awakening of the Knight by Egyptian author Mohamed Tarek (2022) and Jerusalem by Italian historian and novelist Andrea Frediani (2013). The research examines the relationship between these works and historical and literary sources on the Crusades, while also addressing their contemporary political and cultural resonances. The findings suggest that contemporary narratives, as exemplified by these two novels, oscillate between ideological uses of classic concepts of heroism and dichotomies such as good versus evil applied to modern contexts, and a more imaginative, entertaining approach that frames the Crusades as an epic, event-driven story in an attempt to bridge connections between East and West, suggesting the potential for intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding. The analysis underscores the enduring impact of the Crusades on contemporary thought and calls for further exploration of this historical period in modern cultural and civilizational discourse.

[...]dramatic increases in housing costs have enabled, and in turn been enabled by, massive interventions by private equity into the housing market, which have drastically furthered inequality, ballooned household debt, and caused exponential growth in homeless populations, with countries like Canada and New Zealand leading the way in terms of extremity, but with the United States, France, Australia, and Ireland trailing not far behind. France, in particular, has seen a shift away from social housing, and subsidised construction, a strategy of \"national embedding of so-called 'free-market players'\" who aim to maximize profits as part of a broader \"'financialization' of everyday life\" (Pollard, 2009, 173, 171). [...]these recent novels, produced by authors of very different political orientations, Michel Houellebecq and Francois Roux, offer insight into the cultural understanding and representation of an economic reality that appears to be \"everywhere\" (Peck & Tickell, 2002, 380) and \"nowhere\" (Venugopal, 2015, 165). Through the articulations of characters, as well as the economic situations in which the authors place them, inductive analysis can contribute to an understanding of these effects, both broad and deep.

This segment of Sunday Morning is about robots.

An Introduction to Plant Immunity is a comprehensive guide to plant immunology and stress response. The book covers the topic in 21 detailed chapters, starting from an introduction to the subject to the latest knowledge about plant disease resistance. The topics covered in the book include plant pathogens, plant diseases, plant immunity, passive defense mechanisms, acquired resistance, molecular genetics of plant immunology, protein function and genetic engineering. Each chapter provides a reader-friendly introduction along with clear sections detailing each topic. Additionally, detailed references for further reading are also provided. The combination of basic and advanced information on plant immunity make this book an essential textbook for students in botany and plant biology courses. Researchers interested in plant genomics and the effects of environmental and microbial interactions on plants will also benefit from this informative reference.

Writers of the Romantic tradition have often sought a reconciliation with nature, and animals have provided a source of connection through which writers can explore the human-nonhuman relationship. Animal welfare, animal rights and vegetarianism were some of the considerations advanced by Romantic writers of the time questioning Cartesian ideas of animals as mechanistic. Mary Shelley and Herman Melville used anthropomorphic creatures to explore the human- nonhuman animal boundary and advance the idea of nonhuman animals as conscious and agential beings. In this paper, I examine 'Only the Animals' by Ceridwen Dovey, a contemporary novel which seeks to reconsider the animal voice in post-Romantic literary fiction. I also consider the influence of posthumanist thinking on representation and the relationships between human and nonhuman animals with reference to the work of Marc Bekoff and Cary Wolfe.