This book looks at a wide range of fiction and film texts, from the 1950s to the present, in order to analyse the ways in which masculinity has been represented in popular culture in Britain and the ...United States.ÃÂ It covers numerous genres, including spy fiction, science fiction, the Western and police thrillers.ÃÂ Each chapter focuses on key forms of masculinity found in each genre, such as the 'double agent', the 'rogue cop' and the 'citizen-soldier'. Brian Baker takes a broad, contextual approach, placing a detailed discussion of key texts and issues concerning masculinity in their historical and cultural context.ÃÂ Written in a clear, accessible way, it explores the changing representation of men over the last fifty years.
Fictional Feminism Loudermilk, Kim A
2013, 2004, 20130821, 2013-08-21
eBook
This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political ...movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of "fictional feminism" that recuperates feminism's radical potential, thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.
The common thread of astronomy is fantastically important for understanding the Strugatskiis' works--their most important works are experiments in cosmology. This book explores how the Strugatskiis ...cosmological explorations are among the most fundamental elements of their art. It also examines how these explorations connect to their predecessors in the Russian literary tradition.
Drawing on a broad range of personal accounts, this is the first detailed study of siblinghood in wartime. The relative youth of the fighting men of the Great War intensified the emotional salience ...of sibling relationships. Long separations, trauma and bereavement tested sibling ties forged through shared childhoods, family practices, commitments and interests. We must not equate the absence of a verbal language of love with an absence of profound feelings. Quieter familial values of kindness, tolerance and unity, instilled by parents and reinforced by moral instruction, strengthened bonds between brothers and sisters. Examining the nexus of cultural and familial emotional norms, this study reveals the complex acts of mediation undertaken by siblings striving to reconcile conflicting obligations to society, the army and loved ones in families at home. Brothers enlisted and served together. Siblings witnessed departures and homecomings, shared family responsibilities, confided their anxieties and provided mutual support from a distance via letters and parcels. The strength soldier-brothers drew from each other came at an emotional cost to themselves and their comrades. The seismic casualties of the First World War proved a watershed moment in the culture of mourning and bereavement. Grief narratives reveal distinct patterns of mourning following the death of a loved sibling, suggesting a greater complexity to male grief than is often acknowledged. Surviving siblings acted as memory keepers, circumventing the anonymisation of the dead in public commemorations by restoring the particular war stories of their brothers.
This book offers a new rationale for the place of literary reading in the well-lived life. While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real ...benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training-grounds for the capacities: in engaging with them we stand not to become more knowledgeable or more virtuous but more skilled, whether at rational thinking, at maintaining necessary illusions, at achieving tranquillity of mind, or even at religious faith. Instead of offering us propositional knowledge, these texts yield know-how; rather than attempting to instruct by means of their content, they hone capacities by means of their form; far from seducing with the promise of instantaneous transformation, they recognize, with Aristotle, that change is a matter of sustained and patient practice. Their demands are high, but the reward they promise is nothing short of a more richly lived life.
Someone has taken a trip and taken photographs of that trip and someone else has been invited to watch a slideshow of the trip taken. There is a road, there is an abstract painting, there is a viewer ...who wishes he could live in a televised loop of a sunset and another who wonders why people are fat. Tribulations of a Westerner in the Western World is a stunning first book by Vincent Dachy, a narrated slideshow of inner and outer geographies complete with 52 black and white photographs taken by the author.
The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from ...politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the “strange” femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Lange’s Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martín Gaite’s term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.
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