Muggles, Monsters and Magicians

Muggles, Monsters and Magicians PDF Author: Claudia Fenske
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631566619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Originally published as the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Philipps-Universiteat Marburg, 2006.

Muggles, Monsters and Magicians

Muggles, Monsters and Magicians PDF Author: Claudia Fenske
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631566619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Originally published as the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Philipps-Universiteat Marburg, 2006.

Ambiguity in »Star Wars« and »Harry Potter«

Ambiguity in »Star Wars« and »Harry Potter« PDF Author: Christina Flotmann
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839421489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
The study combines theories of myth, popular culture, structuralism and poststructuralism to explain the enormous appeal of »Star Wars« and »Harry Potter«. Although much research already exists on both stories individually, this book is the first to explicitly bring them together in order to explore their set-up and the ways in which their structures help produce ideologies on gender and ethnicity. Hereby, the comparison yields central insights into the workings of modern myth and uncovers structure as integral to the success of the popular genre. It addresses academic audiences and all those wishing to approach the tales from a fresh angle.

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Dina Khapaeva
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472122622
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity. Dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry. “Corpse chic” and “skull style” have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book breaks new ground by viewing these phenomena as aspects of a single movement and documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. This book links the mounting demand for images of violent death with dramatic changes in death-related social rituals. It offers a conceptual framework that connects observations of fictional worlds—including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series—with real-world sociocultural practices, analyzing the aesthetic, intellectual, and historical underpinnings of the cult of death. It also places the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement in shaping the current antihumanist atmosphere. This timely, thought-provoking book will appeal to scholars of culture, film, literature, anthropology, and American and Russian studies, as well as general readers seeking to understand a defining phenomenon of our age.

The Exercise of Biopower through Race and Class in the Harry Potter Series

The Exercise of Biopower through Race and Class in the Harry Potter Series PDF Author: Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152755824X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
This book offers a biopolitical analysis of J. K. Rowling’s globally-known Harry Potter series, including Jack Thorne and John Tiffany’s stage production of Rowling’s story, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016). It indicates that modern children’s fantasy school stories both perpetuate power inequalities as an effective dispositif of bioengineering, and simultaneously provide a political dissident perspective to power relations through an impossible fantasy world parallel to the real one. It applies Michel Foucault’s biopolitical analytics, referring to his key works to reveal that race and class are used interactively as an agent for the exercise of biopower, in addition to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s rereading of Foucauldian biopolitics and biopower, introducing the concepts of “multitude,” “the common,” and “the Empire” to decipher the relationship between power and resistance besides the types and results of resistance in relation to biopolitics and biopower. As such, the book will appeal to undergraduates, academics, and all readers interested in modern fantasy works and school stories as well as critical theories, including those of Foucault and Hardt and Negri, particularly biopolitical analytics.

Picture-Book Professors

Picture-Book Professors PDF Author: Melissa Terras
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108540325
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
How is academia portrayed in children's literature? This Element ambitiously surveys fictional professors in texts marketed towards children, who are overwhelmingly white and male, tending to be elderly scientists. Professors fall into three stereotypes: the vehicle to explain scientific facts, the baffled genius, and the evil madman. By the late twentieth century, the stereotype of the male, mad, muddlehead, called Professor SomethingDumb, is formed in humorous yet pejorative fashion. This Element provides a publishing history of the role of academics in children's literature, questioning the book culture which promotes the enforcement of stereotypes regarding intellectual expertise in children's media. This title is also available, with additional material, as Open Access.

Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel

Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel PDF Author: Sara Martín
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000763315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort sits at the intersection of literary studies and masculinity studies, arguing that the villain, in many works of contemporary British fiction, is a patriarchal figure that embodies an excess of patriarchal power that needs to be controlled by the hero. The villains' stories are enactments of empowerment fantasies and cautionary tales against abusing patriarchal power. While providing readers with in-depth studies of some of the most popular contemporary fiction villans, Sara Martín shows how current representations of the villain are not only measured against previous literary characters but also against the real-life figure of the archvillain Adolf Hitler.

Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film

Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film PDF Author: Sara Martín
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527559300
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
How are men represented on the printed page, the stage and the screen? What do these representations say about masculinity in the past, the present, and the future? The twelve essays in this volume explore the different ways in which men and masculinity have been represented, from the plays of William Shakespeare to the science fiction of Richard K. Morgan, passing through classic fiction by Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens, and popular favourites by Terry Pratchett and Isaac Asimov, without forgetting the Star Wars saga. Collectively, these essays argue that, although much has been written about men, it has been done from a perspective that does not see masculinity as a specific feature in need of critical appraisal. Men need to be made aware of how they are represented in order to alter the toxic patriarchal models handed down to them and even break the extant binary gender models. For that, it is important that men distinguish patriarchy from masculinity, as is done here, and form anti-patriarchal alliances with each other and with women. This book is, then, an invitation to men’s liberation from patriarchy by raising an awareness of its crippling constraints.

Classical Reception and Children's Literature

Classical Reception and Children's Literature PDF Author: Owen Hodkinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Reception studies have transformed the classics. Many more literary and cultural texts are now regarded as 'valid' for classical study. And within this process of widening, children's literature has in its turn emerged as being increasingly important. Books written for children now comprise one of the largest and most prominent bodies of texts to engage with the classical world, with an audience that constantly changes as it grows up. This innovative volume wrestles with that very characteristic of change which is so fundamental to children's literature, showing how significant the classics, as well as classically-inspired fiction and verse, have been in tackling the adolescent challenges posed by metamorphosis. Chapters address such themes as the use made by C S Lewis, in The Horse and his Boy, of Apuleius' The Golden Ass; how Ovidian myth frames the Narnia stories; classical 'nonsense' in Edward Lear; Pan as a powerful symbol of change in children's literature, for instance in The Wind in the Willows; the transformative power of the Orpheus myth; and how works for children have handled the teaching of the classics.

The Secret in Medieval Literature

The Secret in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666917877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts

Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts PDF Author: Filippo Carlà-Uhink
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147253221X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
To what extent did mythological figures such as Circe and Medea influence the representation of the powerful 'oriental' enchantress in modern Western art? What role did the ancient gods and heroes play in the construction of the imaginary worlds of the modern fantasy genre? What is the role of undead creatures like zombies and vampires in mythological films? Looking across the millennia, from the distrust of ancient magic and oriental cults, which threatened the new-born Christian religion, to the revival and adaptation of ancient myths and religion in the arts centuries later, this book offers an original analysis of the reception of ancient magic and the supernatural, across a wide variety of different media – from comics to film, from painting to opera. Working in a variety of fields across the globe, the authors of these essays deconstruct certain scholarly traditions by proposing original interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations, showing to what extent the visual and performing arts of different periods interlink and shape cultural and social identities.