Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of ...communism, fascism, and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work inA Brief History of the Masses, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989.
This open-access essay collection brings together a range of viewpoints on gender from a diverse group of international scholars based in Finland, Belgium, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. The focus ...is, in particular, on gender performativity and non-binary or non-normative gender. The essays examine the ways in which gender can be depicted, perceived, and understood in Japanese popular culture. The work will be of interest to scholars working in gender studies, Asian studies, and popular culture. It will also act as a source text for higher education courses in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Top scholars in eighteenth-century studies examine the significance of the parallel devaluations of women's culture and popular culture by looking at theatres and actresses; novels, magazines, and ...cookbooks; and populist politics, dress, and portraiture.
We are often told that the Victorians were far less violent than their forebears: over the course of the nineteenth century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, violent crime, including homicide, ...notably declined, and punishments were hidden from public view within prison walls. They were also much more respectable, and actively sought orderly, uplifting, domestic and refined pastimes. Yet these were the very same people who celebrated the exceptionally violent careers of anti-heroes such as the brutal puppet Punch and the murderous barber Sweeney Todd. By drawing attention to the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements patronised by ordinary Londoners this book challenges our understanding of Victorian society and culture. From the turn of the nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, 're-enactments' of high level violence flourished in travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers.
Georg Lukács's The Specificity of the Aesthetic is both a return to first principles and an attempt to reconstruct the philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history underlying Marxism.
Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated ...white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya's stories expose the power and reach of this myth, not only in advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.
The American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture ...fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media.
In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular ...culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all, as this collection shows, is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. In this collection of essays, Japanese and American scholars offer richly detailed descriptions of how this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, this groundbreaking collection provides fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
