Comic Democracies

Comic Democracies PDF Author: Angus Fletcher
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421419343
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on new empirical research from the political and cognitive sciences, Angus Fletcher deftly analyzes the narrative elements of two dozen stage plays, novels, romances, histories, and operas written by such authors as Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving. He unearths five comic techniques that were used to foster democratic behaviors in antiquity and the Renaissance, then traces the role of these techniques in Tom Paine's Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson's preamble to the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's farewell address, Mercy Otis Warren's federalist history of the Revolution, Frederick Douglass's abolitionist orations, and other key documents that played a pivotal role in the development of the early American Republic. --Publisher description.

Comic Democracies

Comic Democracies PDF Author: Angus Fletcher
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421419343
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on new empirical research from the political and cognitive sciences, Angus Fletcher deftly analyzes the narrative elements of two dozen stage plays, novels, romances, histories, and operas written by such authors as Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving. He unearths five comic techniques that were used to foster democratic behaviors in antiquity and the Renaissance, then traces the role of these techniques in Tom Paine's Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson's preamble to the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's farewell address, Mercy Otis Warren's federalist history of the Revolution, Frederick Douglass's abolitionist orations, and other key documents that played a pivotal role in the development of the early American Republic. --Publisher description.

Comic Democracies

Comic Democracies PDF Author: Angus Fletcher
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 1421419351
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Invites its readers to note the leaders and people who are willing and able to laugh, with and at themselves . . . Our political life may depend upon it.” —The Review of Politics For two thousand years, democratic authors treated comedy as a toolkit of rhetorical practices for encouraging problem-solving, pluralism, risk-taking, and other civic behaviors that increased minority participation in government. Over the past two centuries, this pragmatic approach to extending the franchise has been displaced by more idealistic democratic philosophies that focus instead on promoting liberal principles and human rights. But in the wake of the recent “democracy recession” in the Middle East, the Third World, and the West itself, there has been renewed interest in finding practical sources of popular rule. Comic Democracies joins in the search by exploring the value of the old comic tools for growing democracy today. Drawing on new empirical research from the political and cognitive sciences, Angus Fletcher deftly analyzes the narrative elements of two dozen stage plays, novels, romances, histories, and operas written by such authors as Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving. He unearths five comic techniques used to foster democratic behaviors in antiquity and the Renaissance, then traces the role of these techniques in Tom Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s farewell address, Mercy Otis Warren’s federalist history of the Revolution, Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist orations, and other documents that played a pivotal role in the development of the American Republic. After recovering these lost chapters of our democratic past, Comic Democracies concludes with a draft for the future, using the old methods of comedy to envision a modern democracy—rooted in the diversity, ingenuity, and power of popular art. “Fletcher’s main theory is convincing and will open up new fields of inquiry. This accessible work is for those interested in political science, cultural history, and comic theory as well as classical literature.” —Choice

Democratic Swarms

Democratic Swarms PDF Author: Page duBois
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226818284
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics. With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy. Ancient comedy has been underplayed in the study of Greek drama. Yet, with the irrepressible energy of the comic swarm, it provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. Using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, duBois augments tragic thought with the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy, and she connects the lively anti-authoritarianism of the ancient comic chorus with the social justice movements of today.

Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946-1962

Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946-1962 PDF Author: Chris York
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786489472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conventional wisdom holds that comic books of the post-World War II era are poorly drawn and poorly written publications, notable only for the furor they raised. Contributors to this thoughtful collection, however, demonstrate that these comics constitute complex cultural documents that create a dialogue between mainstream values and alternative beliefs that question or complicate the grand narratives of the era. Close analysis of individual titles, including EC comics, Superman, romance comics, and other, more obscure works, reveals the ways Cold War culture--from atomic anxieties and the nuclear family to communist hysteria and social inequalities--manifests itself in the comic books of the era. By illuminating the complexities of mid-century graphic novels, this study demonstrates that postwar popular culture was far from monolithic in its representation of American values and beliefs.

Thicker Than Water

Thicker Than Water PDF Author: Lauren Weindling
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361014
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The proverb goes that "blood is thicker than water." But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Does this maxim presume that we can or should only love others biologically similar to ourselves? Are we nobler if we do, or somehow defective if we don't? "Thicker than Water" examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe, specifically its role in the creation and maintenance of oppressive social structures. Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta's La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton's No Wit/Help Like a Woman's, John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Machiavelli's La Mandragola. Each of these plays in some way offers an extreme limit case for these beliefs in plots of love, courtship, and marriage (e.g., blood feuds or incest). They also illustrate that blood functions not as a biological basis for affinities, but discursively. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by this ideology, which present significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview. Those outsiders reveal that finding alternative vocabularies to the bloody discourse of elite groups is both extremely difficult and often ineffectual, further evidenced by their persistence today. Much critical work on blood has examined this discourse as it manifests onstage: as evidence of guilt, the product of violence, or in bleeding figures. This book, instead, examines the work that blood does unseen in its connection to discourses of love and kinship-arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization"--

Comic Book Century

Comic Book Century PDF Author: Stephen Krensky
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 0822566540
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Get Book Here

Book Description
Uses newspaper articles, historical overviews, and personal interviews to explain the history of American comic books and graphic novels.

A Cultural History of Humour

A Cultural History of Humour PDF Author: Jan Bremmer
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745618807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Humour is without doubt a vital element of the human condition but it has rarely been the subject of serious historical research. Yet a closer look at jokes and other comic phenomena shows us that the nature of humour changes from one period to another, and that these changes can provide us with important insights into the social and cultural developments of the past. This important and highly original book sets out to explore the terra incognita of humour through the ages - from jokes and stage humour in Greece and Rome to the jestbooks of early modern Europe, from practical jokes in Renaissance Italy to comic painting during the Dutch Golden Age, from Bakhtin's conception of laughter to the joking relationships of anthropologists. These innovative accounts move humour into the centre of social and cultural history and throw an unexpected light on life and manners through the ages.

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art PDF Author: Matthew Pethers
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684485096
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science PDF Author: Howard Marchitello
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137463619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives

Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives PDF Author: Sebastian Domsch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110446839
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 649

Get Book Here

Book Description
Whether one describes them as sequential art, graphic narratives or graphic novels, comics have become a vital part of contemporary culture. Their range of expression contains a tremendous variety of forms, genres and modes − from high to low, from serial entertainment for children to complex works of art. This has led to a growing interest in comics as a field of scholarly analysis, as comics studies has established itself as a major branch of criticism. This handbook combines a systematic survey of theories and concepts developed in the field alongside an overview of the most important contexts and themes and a wealth of close readings of seminal works and authors. It will prove to be an indispensable handbook for a large readership, ranging from researchers and instructors to students and anyone else with a general interest in this fascinating medium.