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The papers in this book respond to the public debate over literary canons, in the United States, and elsewhere, by placing the political-ideological aspects of the conflict inside perspectives derived from comparative literature. Canons are seen by most of the contributors as based on democratic and communal intentions or choices inevitable filtered through and colored by historical experiences and social biases.An examination of the canonical process over many centuries reveals both the impressive durability of its elements and the amazing flexibility of its outlines. The careful individual analyses, as well as the thought-provoking general contributions in this volume agree that the democracy of play is one of the strongest bonds uniting the human race. \"Canons or canons\", the contributors argue, are based on it and reflect the intimate interdependence of cultural and intellectual matters with the workings of society as a whole. Contributors Charles Altieri, Lilian R. Furst, Michael G. Cooke, Robert Royal, Roger Shattuck, Rosa E.M.D. Penna, Glen M. Johnson, Yves Chevrel, Raymond A. Prier, Peter Walker, Christopher Clausen, Virgil Nemoianu.

Everybody’s got a theory . . . or do they? Thomas McLaughlin argues that critical theory—raising serious, sustained questions about cultural practice and ideology—is practiced not only by an academic elite but also by savvy viewers of sitcoms and TV news, by Elvis fans and Trekkies, by labor organizers and school teachers, by the average person in the street. Like academic theorists, who are trained in a tradition of philosophical and political skepticism that challenges all orthodoxies, the vernacular theorists McLaughlin identifies display a lively and healthy alertness to contradiction and propaganda. They are not passive victims of ideology but active questioners of the belief systems that have power over their lives. Their theoretical work arises from the circumstances they confront on the job, in the family, in popular culture. And their questioning of established institutions, McLaughlin contends, is essential and healthy, for it energizes other theorists who clarify the purpose and strategies of institutions and justify the existence of cultural practices. Street Smarts and Critical Theory leads us through eye-opening explorations of social activism in the Southern Christian anti-pornography movement, fan critiques in the ‘zine scene, New Age narratives of healing and transformation, the methodical manipulations of the advertising profession, and vernacular theory in the whole-language movement. Emphasizing that theory is itself a pervasive cultural practice, McLaughlin calls on academic institutions to recognize and develop the theoretical strategies that students bring into the classroom. “This book demystifies the idea of theory, taking it out of the hands of a priestly caste and showing it as the democratic endowment of the people.”—Daniel T. O’Hara, Temple University, author of Radical Parody: American Culture and Critical Agency after Foucault and Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. “McLaughlin takes seriously the critical and theoretical activity of everyday people and does so in a way that will empower these very populations to take seriously their own activities as theorists. . . . A manifesto that is sure to be heard by the younger generation of thinkers in American cultural studies.”—Henry Jenkins, MIT, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

In this important book, Ken Gelder offers a lively, progressive and comprehensive account of popular fiction as a distinctive literary field. Drawing on a wide range of popular novelists, from Sir Walter Scott and Marie Corelli to Ian Fleming, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, his book describes for the first time how this field works and what its unique features are. In addition, Gelder provides a critical history of three primary genres - romance, crime fiction and science fiction - and looks at the role of bookshops, fanzines and prozines in the distribution and evaluation of popular fiction. Finally, he examines five bestselling popular novelists in detail - John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Jackie Collins and J. R. R. Tolkien - to see how popular fiction is used, discussed and identified in contemporary culture.

Potboilers looks at the many forms of popular narrative - in print, film and TV. It considers the ways in they have been analysed in literary criticism, sociology, communications, media and cultural studies. The book introduces and summarizes two decades of debate about mass-produced fictions and their position within popular culture. It assesses the methods that have been used in these debates, focussing both on narrative analysis and the communications process. It explores generic conventions, the role of commercial strategies, and the nature of the audience with reference to crime fiction, soap opera, romance and TV sitcom. Distinctions between `high' and `low' culture have relegated many popular forms to the trash-can of `great' literature. This book takes stock of the methods and concepts used to analyse popular culture and argues for a non-elitist approach to the study of literature, film and television.

Nussers Buch gibt einen Überblick über die Geschichte und Theorie der Trivialliteratur. Der Band bietet eine umfassende, alle Aspekte der Forschung berücksichtigende Orientierung. Er bildet einen sicheren Ausgangspunkt für jede weitere Beschäftigung mit dem Thema.

\"Reading Into Cultural Studies\" revisits a selection of key texts central to the formation of cultural studies as a discipline and as a project. These texts address questions of power, ideology and the possibilities and limits of resistance. Each of the eleven essays in the collection renews an early study in one area of cultural investigation, bringing such seminal texts as \"Subculture\" by Dick Hebdige, \"Loving With a Vengeance\" by Tania Modleski and \"Bond and Beyond\" by Tony Bennett back to the centre of attention, However the essays are not purely celebratory. Each study is critically examined in a number of ways - for its research strategy, its implicit theories of power and ideology, for the empirical evidence it draws on and its conceptual framework. Together, the essays provide an introduction to some of the central debates and issues in cultural studies.

Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relationship between mind and body and between experience and the senses. Some chapters discuss literature, in studies of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; other essays concentrate on philosophical arguments, both Aristotelian and Galenic models from antiquity, and new mechanistic formations in Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. A powerful sense of paradox emerges in treatments of the passions in the early modern period, also reflected in new literary and philosophical forms in which inwardness was displayed, analysed and studied\"the autobiography, the essay, the soliloquy\"genres which rewrite the formation of subjectivity. At the same time, the frame of reference moves outwards, from the world of interior states to encounter the passions on a public stage, thus reconnecting literary study with the history of political thought. In between the abstract theory of political ideas and the inward selves of literary history, lies a field of intersections waiting to be explored. The passions, like human nature itself, are infinitely variable, and provoke both literary experimentation and philosophical imagination. Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture thus makes new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the emotions in order to suggest both new models of the self and new models for interdisciplinary history.

Mark J.P. Wolf's study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds departs from prior approaches to imaginary worlds that focused mainly on narrative, medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds-which are often transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature-are compelling objects of inquiry for Media Studies. Chapters touch on: a theoretical analysis of how world-building extends beyond storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way worlds are conceptualized and experienced, a history of imaginary worlds that follows their development over three millennia from the fictional islands of Homer's Odyssey to the present internarrative theory examining how narratives set in the same world can interact and relate to one another an examination of transmedial growth and adaptation, and what happens when worlds make the jump between media an analysis of the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds, the resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of canonicity, participatory worlds, and subcreation's relationship with divine Creation Building Imaginary Worlds also provides the scholar of imaginary worlds with a glossary of terms and a detailed timeline that spans three millennia and more than 1,400 imaginary worlds, listing their names, creators, and the works in which they first appeared.