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Foltz, Jonathan. The Novel after Film. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190676490.001.0001.
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The Novel After Film examines how literary fiction has been redefined in response to the emergence of narrative film. It charts the institutional, stylistic, and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamour of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel’s respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and high moral purpose, a range of authors, from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Henry Green and Aldous Huxley, turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism’s atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film’s violations of style took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in changing the way that novelists addressed a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.
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Rogers, Holly, and Jeremy Barham, eds. The Music and Sound of Experimental Film. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.001.0001.
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This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.
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Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. Silent Ghosts on the Screen. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199331000.013.9.
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During the 1910s and early 1920s, some thirty known film adaptations of works by Henrik Ibsen were produced in a number of countries. Chapter 9 examines the four American silent film Ibsen adaptations still known to exist: The Pillars of Society (1911), Peer Gynt (1915), Ghosts (1915), and Pillars of Society (1916). Drawing on extant film material, contemporary film reviews, and trade press articles, it approaches these films, through their various adaptation strategies and their trade press reception, in terms of broader discourses about what is often characterized as the transitional period in US film history, focusing in particular on discussions throughout the 1910s concerning medium specificity and media borders. The essay emphasizes stylistic and narrative strategies in the four films, in particular those connected to space, narrative, and performance, as well as ethical and moral considerations associated with the Ibsen film, including their contemporaneous reception.
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Telotte, J. P. Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190949655.001.0001.
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This book considers the impact that the new art of film had on the development of the emerging science fiction (SF) genre during the pre- and early post-World War II era, during the time that the genre was trying to locate an identity, develop its key themes, and even settle on a name. Focusing on the primary venue for early SF literature, the popular pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories, it traces this early film/literature relationship by examining four common features of the pulps: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editors’ commentaries and readers’ remarks on film; and cover and story illustrations. All these features demonstrate an interest and even a fascination with the movies, which, as many of SF’s readers, writers, and editors recognized, demonstrated a modernist agenda similar to that which characterized the literature. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early SF discourse, this book shows how that cinematic influence penetrated and, both consciously and unconsciously, helped shape the experience of SF, as well as the cultural idea of SF during this formative period.
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Joyce, Justin A. Gunslinging justice. Manchester University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526126160.001.0001.
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Gunslinging justice explores American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system to argue that Western shootouts are less overtly “anti-law” than has been previously assumed. While the genre’s climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence and stylized revenge drama of seminal Western texts then, seeks not to oppose "the law," but rather to expand its scope. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre and its associated discourses across varied cultural and social forms, breaks from psychoanalytic perspectives which have long dominated studies of film and legal discourse and occluded historical contingencies integral to the work cultural forms do in the world. From nineteenth century texts like Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Reconstruction era dime novels, through early twentieth century works like The Virginian, to classic Westerns and more recent films like Unforgiven (1992), this book looks to the intersections between American law and various media that have enabled a cultural, social, and political acceptance of defensive gun violence that is still with us today.
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Lewis, Hannah. French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.001.0001.
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French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema examines film music practices in France during a period of widespread artistic and creative experimentation: the transition from silent to synchronized sound film. While this period in Hollywood has been examined from a range of scholarly perspectives, the transition to sound in France—and the unique interactions between French sound cinema and French musical discourses—remains underexplored. In France, debates about sound cinema were fierce and widespread, and many filmmakers addressed theoretical questions about the potential of the new technology head-on, articulating their responses to these questions both in writing and in their films. Music played an integral role in the debate. Lewis argues that debates about sound film had a powerful effect on French musical culture of the early 1930s, and that diverse French musical styles and traditions—from Les Six, to the opera house, to the popular music-hall—played a crucial role in shaping the cinematic soundscape. Filmmakers experimented with music’s role in sound cinema within a range of genres, including avant-garde surrealist cinema (Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau), recorded theater (Marcel Pagnol), early poetic realism (Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo), and the film musical (René Clair). Lewis’s analysis of the experiments undertaken in these few important years in French cinematic history encourages readers to challenge commonly held assumptions of how genres, media, and artistic forms relate to one another, and how these relationships are renegotiated during moments of technological change.
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Warren, Shilyh. Subject to Reality. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042539.001.0001.
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This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”
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Bench, Harmony. Monstrous Belonging. Edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199897827.013.025.
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This chapter begins by reviewing the importance of Michael Jackson’s early forays in music video, paying particular attention to the short film, “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” from 1983. Jackson’s monstrosity and Ola Ray’s victimization in this film are addressed. This chapter then turns to recent adaptations and performances of “Thriller,” arguing that as a choreography, “Thriller” became a privileged site for articulating a collective sense of belonging in the early twenty-first century. In an era that amplified American insecurity and paranoia, performances of “Thriller” circulating through social media show how performers used the choreography to embody monstrosity, domesticate fear, dissipate threat, form an American public outside nationalist discourses, and resignify public spaces rendered threatening by the “War on Terror.”
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Johnson, Kevin B. Fascinations for the Nation. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037689.003.0006.
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This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.
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Cassis, Youssef, and Giuseppe Telesca. Financial Crises and the Public Discourse on Financial Elites. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198782797.003.0002.
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Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.
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Wilson, George M. Narrative. Edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279456.003.0022.
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Narratology is the general theory of narratives and the structures they exemplify. The classical structuralist narratology of Todorov, C. Bremond, A. Greimas, and early Roland Barthes was concerned primarily with narrative as narrative product. In selecting that emphasis and in other methodological matters, these authors were influenced by their proto-structuralist predecessors, Russian formalists such as V. Shklovsky and V. Propp. Theorists in the linked traditions highlighted the fact that stories, both fictional and non-fictional, can be represented in very different narrative discourses. Indeed, the same story can be rendered in discourses that have been constructed within different media, such as literature, film, or theatre. A key analytical task of structuralist narratology has been to delineate the features of stories that are invariant across the fiction/non-fiction division and across the variety of their more specific realizations in different discourses and media.
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McAnany, Emile G. Another Paradigm. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036774.003.0006.
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This chapter focuses on the rise of the participation paradigm from the early 1980s through the end of the 1990s, noting that it is still the dominant discourse within the field of communication for development (c4d) today. The idea of people participating in their own development goes back to the beginning of communication for development and social change. This approach refocused the effort of c4d on people as the engines of change, and trusting them to be up to the challenge. This chapter first considers different kinds of participation and what they might mean, along with the context for participatory communication in c4d during the period 1970–1990s. It then turns to pioneers of participatory communication in development and goes on to address the question of whether the approach deserves the title of paradigm, much less that of a dominant one. It also examines a case that illustrates both the problems and the successes of the application of the participation paradigm: Canada's Challenge for Change initiative, implemented by the National Film Board in Fogo Island.
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Potter, Susan. Queer Timing. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042461.001.0001.
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This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.
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Schotter, Jesse. The ‘Essence’ of Egypt. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424776.003.0005.
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The fourth chapter restores hieroglyphs to their historical and cultural context in post-Revolutionary Egypt, exploring how interpretations of the Pharaonic past and its hieroglyphs intervened in Egypt’s twentieth century struggles for cultural and national identity. The first novels by Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, from the 1920s and 30s, draw on the ‘Pharaonicist’ movement of the period, co-opting the European Orientalist discourses with which Egypt was defined in order to forge their own definitions of the racial and cultural ‘essence’ of Egypt. Yet these national concerns remain linked with an interest in the ontology of media forms; the chapter concludes by focusing on Shadi Abd al-Salam’s film al-Mummia, from 1969, which looks back to early twentieth century Pharaonicism and connects its attempt to reclaim the past with film’s ability to record and preserve Egyptian hieroglyphs and artifacts.
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Hornby, Louise. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190661229.003.0001.
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The introduction provides an overview of the book and sets out the photographic stakes of stillness in the historical context of the early twentieth century and the invention of motion pictures. These two technologies—photography and motion pictures—provide the ground for reframing the modernist debate around stasis-kinesis, which has typically played out unevenly on the side of discourses of speed and acceleration, focusing on the creation and impact of ever newer and ever faster technologies of motion, such as the railway, the motor car, the modern assembly line, and motion pictures. However, stillness remains an obdurate stopping point and necessary critical intervention in such kinetic economies. Charting the book’s interdisciplinary terrain, the introduction brings art history and film studies to bear upon each other to determine the critical purchase of stillness, how it accrued a negative meaning, and how modernist writers, filmmakers, and artists negotiated its limits.
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Wyke, Maria. The Pleasures and Punishments of Roman Error. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198803034.003.0011.
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Early cinema, this chapter argues, struggled to balance the competing claims of moral purpose and entertainment where the legacy of Roman error was concerned. At the same time, cinema also sought to redefine and outperform other modes of classical reception (such as theatre, opera, painting, and the novel). Through a close examination of the French film Héliogabale, ou l’orgie romaine (Elagabalus, or the Roman Orgy), this chapter reveals how this dynamic plays out in the case of the boy-ruler viewed by tradition as the worst of Roman emperors. While the film’s concluding punishment of the emperor by a virile praetorian guard evokes contemporary French discourses of regeneration out of national decline, The Roman Orgy also displays an internal conflict in lingering pleasurably over Elagabalus’s transgressions. In this, its central character becomes device for cinematic mise-en-abyme, a technique that reflects the broader cultural debate over cinema in France.
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Forster, Chris. Filthy Material. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190840860.001.0001.
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Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.
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McLarney, Ellen Anne. Covering in the Public Eye. Princeton University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691158488.003.0005.
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This chapter explores the life and writings of three main personalities who contributed to shaping an aesthetics of veiling in disparate but analogous ways. In their writings and their performances of a public self, these writers construct a sense of the psychic space that the outward sign of the veil helps cultivate. This psychic space, this spiritual interiority, is created by veiling but also by the words, discourses, narratives, and images of the veil in public culture and public circulation. Each writer has been profoundly invested in the politics of performance—in television (Kariman Hamza), film (Shams al-Barudi), and theater and cultural criticism (Safinaz Kazim). These three early exemplars were pivotal in formulating the ideological and conceptual contours of the genre. They set down motifs and described psychic transformations that would become classic signposts on the path to veiling. Their narratives envisioned new kinds of Islamic media in which the visual signifier of the veil would become ascendant.
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Kim, Su Yun. Imperial Romance. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501751882.001.0001.
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This book argues that the idea of colonial intimacy within the Japanese empire of the early twentieth century had a far broader and more popular influence on discourse makers, social leaders, and intellectuals than previously understood. The book investigates representations of Korean–Japanese intimate and familial relationships — including romance, marriage, and kinship — in literature, media, and cinema, alongside documents that discuss colonial policies during the Japanese protectorate period and colonial rule in Korea (1905–45). Focusing on Korean perspectives, the book uncovers political meaning in the representation of intimacy and emotion between Koreans and Japanese portrayed in print media and films. It disrupts the conventional reading of colonial-period texts as the result of either coercion or the disavowal of colonialism, thereby expanding our understanding of colonial writing practices. The theme of intermarriage gave elite Korean writers and cultural producers opportunities to question their complicity with imperialism. Their fictions challenged expected colonial boundaries, creating tensions in identity and hierarchy, and also in narratives of the linear developmental trajectory of modernity. Examining a broad range of writings and films from this period, the book maps the colonized subjects' fascination with their colonizers and with moments that allowed them to become active participants in and agents of Japanese and global imperialism.
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Gardner, Hunter H. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796428.001.0001.
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Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.
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Vandrei, Martha. Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816720.001.0001.
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This innovative and distinctive book takes a long chronological view and a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. It is the definitive work on the posthumous reputation of the ever-popular warrior queen of the Iceni, Queen Boadicea/Boudica. It explores her presence in British historical discourse, from the early modern rediscovery of the works of Tacitus to the first historical films of the early twentieth century. In doing so, the book seeks to demonstrate the continuity and persistence of historical ideas across time and throughout a variety of media. This focus on continuity leads into an examination of the nature of history as a cultural phenomenon and the implications this has for our own conceptions of history and its role in culture more generally. While providing contemporary contextual readings of Boudica’s representations, this book also explores the unique nature of historical ideas as durable cultural phenomena, articulated by very different individuals over time, all of whom were nevertheless engaged in the creative process of making history. Thus this book presents a challenge to the axioms of cultural history, new historicism, and other mainstays of twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical scholarship. It shows how, long before professional historians sought to monopolize historical practice, audiences encountered visions of past ages created by antiquaries, playwrights, poets, novelists, and artists, all of whom engaged with, articulated, and even defined the meaning of ‘historical truth’. This book argues that these individual depictions, variable audience reactions, and the abiding notion of history as truth constitute the substance of historical culture.
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Smith, Victoria Ford. Between Generations. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496813374.001.0001.
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Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.
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Fontani, Marco, Mariagrazia Costa, and Mary Virginia Orna. The Lost Elements. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199383344.001.0001.
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The Periodic Table of Elements hasn't always looked like it does now, a well-organized chart arranged by atomic number. In the mid-nineteenth century, chemists were of the belief that the elements should be sorted by atomic weight. However, the weights of many elements were calculated incorrectly, and over time it became clear that not only did the elements need rearranging, but that the periodic table contained many gaps and omissions: there were elements yet to be discovered, and the allure of finding one had scientists rushing to fill in the blanks. Supposed "discoveries" flooded laboratories, and the debate over what did and did not belong on the periodic table reached a fever pitch. With the discovery of radioactivity, the discourse only intensified. Throughout its formation, the Periodic Table of Elements has seen false entries, good-faith errors, retractions, and dead ends. In fact, there have been more falsely proclaimed elemental discoveries throughout history than there are elements on the table as we know it today. The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table's Shadow Side collects the most notable of these instances, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. The book tells the story of how scientists have come to understand elements, by discussing the failed theories and false discoveries that shaped the path of scientific progress. We learn of early chemists' stubborn refusal to disregard alchemy as a legitimate practice, and of one German's supposed discovery of an elemental metal that breathed. As elements began to be created artificially in the twentieth century, we watch the discovery climate shift to favor the physicists, rather than the chemists. Along the way, Fontani, Costa, and Orna introduce us to the key figures in the development of today's periodic table, including Lavoisier and Mendeleev. Featuring a preface from Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, The Lost Elements is an expansive history of the wrong side of chemical discovery-and reveals how these errors and gaffes have helped shape the table as much as any other form of scientific progress.