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"Popular Culture, Literary Criticism"
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Bringing Light to Twilight : Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon
\"Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series has met with astonishing commercial success--not just amongst adolescent girls, but with college students, middle-aged women, and writers and publishers who hope to capitalize on the author's achievements by tapping into a primed market. For all of these reasons, it becomes a vital enterprise to investigate the themes of the Twilight books and the ways they encourage readers to perceive and interact with the world around them. The essays in this collection approach Meyer's novels from diverse perspectives, and will be of interest to academic and lay readers alike: undergraduates and graduate students; instructors of young adult literature, contemporary U.S. writing, the Gothic, and popular culture; the myriad Twilight fans who seek to explore and re-explore the novels from a variety of angles\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
No joke
Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.
Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she explores memorable and telling examples from German, Yiddish, English, Russian, and Hebrew. Among other topics, the book looks at how Jewish humor channeled Jewish learning and wordsmanship into new avenues of creativity, brought relief to liberal non-Jews in repressive societies, and enriched popular culture in the United States.
Even as it invites readers to consider the pleasures and profits of Jewish humor, the book asks difficult but fascinating questions: Can the excess and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor go too far and backfire in the process? And is \"leave 'em laughing\" the wisest motto for a people that others have intended to sweep off the stage of history?
eBook
The rural gothic in American popular culture : backwoods horror and terror in the wilderness
\"From the very beginnings of an independent literary culture, the North American wilderness has often served as the setting for narratives in which the boundaries between order and chaos, savagery and civilization are torn down, and the natural world - as well as the individuals and creatures associated with it - becomes a threat to physical and moral safety. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture argues that complex and often negative initial responses early European settlers expressed toward the North American Wilderness continue to influence American horror and gothic narratives to this day. The book undertakes a detailed and historically grounded analysis of key literary and filmic texts. The works of canonical authors such as Mary Rowlandson, Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne are discussed, as are the origins and characteristics of the backwoods horror film tradition and the post-1960 eco-horror narrative. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Girls' series fiction and American popular culture
Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America's tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of American girls have been exposed to girls' series in some form, whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture and, in doing so, girls' everyday experiences from the mid nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the cultural work that is performed through the series genre, contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and feminism.
eBook
On the graphic novel
\"A noted comics artist himself, Santiago García follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world. Garcia not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral characters, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, Garcia illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comes and what they can achieve\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Aesopic conversations
Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of \"great\" and \"little\" traditions spanning centuries.
eBook
Dracula and the Gothic in literature, pop culture and the arts
This volume brings together fourteen articles that reappraise the productivity of Stoker's Dracula and the strong influence it still exerts on today's generations. The volume explores various multimodal and multimedia adaptations of the book, by critically examining its literary, cinematic, theatrical, televised and artistic versions. In so doing, it reassesses the origins, evolution, imagery, mythology, theory and criticism of Gothic fiction and of the Gothic (sub)culture. The volume is innovative in that it congregates various angles to the Gothic phenomenon, providing an overview of the interdisciplinary relationships between different cultural, artistic and creative reworkings of the Gothic in general and of Stoker's legacy in particular.
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Frantic Panoramas
Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture-from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. InFrantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition.
For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective \"workshop\" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms.
Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism,Frantic Panoramasis an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.
eBook
Soviet and post-Soviet identities
\"Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection examines the ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV, cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths, institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an accessible and lively way\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Litcomix
Critical studies of the graphic novel have often employed
methodologies taken from film theory and art criticism. Yet, as
graphic novels from Maus to Watchmen have
entered the literary canon, perhaps the time has come to
develop theories for interpreting and evaluating graphic novels
that are drawn from classic models of literary theory and
criticism. Using the methodology of Georg Lukács and his detailed
defense of literary realism as a socially embedded practice,
Litcomix tackles difficult questions about reading graphic
novels as literature. What critical standards should we use to
measure the quality of a graphic novel? How does the genre
contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the world? What
qualities distinguish it from other forms of literature?
LitComix hones its theoretical approach through case
studies taken from across the diverse world of comics, from
Yoshihiro Tatsumi's groundbreaking manga to the Hernandez Brothers'
influential alt-comix. Whether looking at graphic novel adaptations
of Proust or considering how Jack Kirby's use of intertextuality
makes him the Balzac of comics, this study offers fresh
perspectives on how we might appreciate graphic novels as
literature.
eBook