Author: Emma Roche
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000870928
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This book interrogates the significance of the revival and reformulation of the romance genre in the postmillennial period. Emma Roche examines how six popular novels, published between 2005 and 2015 (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects and The Girl on the Train), reanimate and modify recognisable tropes from the romance genre to reflect a neoliberal and postfeminist cultural climate. As such, Roche argues, these novels function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging those contemporary gender ideologies. Throughout the book, Roche addresses and critiques several key attributes of neoliberal postfeminism, including a pervasive emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility; an insistent requirement for self-monitoring, self-surveillance, and bodywork; the celebration of consumerism and its associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one’s ‘negative’ emotions; and the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women’s empowerment. While much critical attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, Roche argues that one crucial repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how these ideologies function together to effectively sanction gender-based violence. Thus, Roche exploits textual analysis to demonstrate the subtle ways in which neoliberal postfeminism can augment women’s vulnerability to male violence.
Author: Erin Giannini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003850103
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
The idea of metatextuality is frequently framed as a recent television development and often paired with the idea that it represents genre exhaustion. US television, however, with its early “live” performances and set-bound sitcoms, always suggested an element of self-awareness that easily shaded into metatextuality even in its earliest days. Meta Television thus traces the general history of US television’s metatextuality throughout television’s history, arguing that TV’s self-awareness is nothing new—and certainly not evidence of a period of aesthetic exhaustion—but instead is woven into both its past and present practice, elucidated through case studies featuring series from the 1970s to the present day—many of which have not been critically analyzed before—and the various ways they deploy metatext to both construct and deconstruct their narratives. Further, Meta Television asserts that this re- and de-construction of narrative and production isn’t just a reward to the savvy and/or knowledgeable viewer (or consumer), but seeks to make broader points about the media we consume—and how we consume it. This book explores the ways in which the current metatextual turn, in both the usual genres in which it appears (horror and sci-fi/fantasy) and its movement into drama and sitcom, represents the next turn in television’s inherent self-awareness. It traces this element throughout television’s history, growing from the more modest reflexivity of programs’ awareness of themselves, as created objects in a particular medium, to the more significant breaking of the fictive illusion and therefore the perceived distance between the audience and the series. Erin Giannini shows how the increased currency of metatextual television in the contemporary era can be tied to a viewership well-versed in its stories and production as well as able and willing to “talk back” via social media. If television reflects culture to a certain extent, this increased reflexivity mirrors that “responsive” audience as a consequence of the lack of distance that metafiction embraces. As Robert Stam traced the use—and implications—of reflexivity in film and literature, this book does the same for television, further problematizing John Ellis’s glance theory in terms of both production and spectatorship.
Author: Lorraine Ryan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000374076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
Almudena Grandes is one of Spain ́s foremost women ́s writers, having sold over 1.1 million copies of her episodios de una guerra interminable, her six-volume series that ranges from the Spanish Civil War to the democratic period; the myriad prizes awarded to her, 18 in total, confirm her pre-eminence. This book situates Grandes ́s novels within gendered, philosophical, and mnemonic theoretical concepts that illuminate hidden dimensions of her much-studied work. Lorraine Ryan considers and expands on existing critical work on Grandes ́s oeuvre, proposing new avenues of interpretation and understanding. She seeks to debunk the arguments of those who portray Grandes as the proponent of a sectarian, eminently biased Republican memory by analysing the wide variety of gender and perpetrator memories that proliferate in her work. The intersection of perpetrator memory with masculinity, ecocriticism, medical ethics and the child’s perspectives confirms Grandes’ nuanced engagement with Spanish memory culture. Departing from a philosophical basis, Ryan reconfigures the Republican victim in the novels as a vulnerable subject who attempts to flourish, thus refuting the current critical opinion of the victim as overly-empowered. The new perspectives produced in this monograph do not aim to suggest that Grandes is an advocate of perpetrator memory; rather, it suggests that Grandes is committed to a more pluralistic idea of memory culture, whereby her novels generate understanding of multiple victim, perpetrator and gender memories, an analysis that produces new and meaningful engagements with these novels. Thus, Ryan contends that Grandes ́s historical novels are infinitely more complex and nuanced than heretofore conceived.
Author: Sharada Chigurupati
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666906263
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
"American Literary Studies in Postmillennial India critically investigates multiple perspectives demonstrated by American poets, dramatists, and fiction writers. It discusses universal themes of racism, class, gender, and identity crisis and demonstrates how American letters influence the Indian intellectual scene and how it is interpreted in turn"--
Author: Hsu-Ming Teo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040085415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.
Author: Rachel Gregory Fox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000547639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
This book critically examines the representational politics of women in post-millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran across a range of literary, visual, and digital media. Introducing the conceptual model of remediated witnessing, the book contemplates the ways in which meaning is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed as a consequence of its (re)production and (re)distribution. In what ways is information re framed? The chapters in this book therefore analyse the reiterative processes via which Afghan, Pakistani, and Iranian women are represented in a range of contemporary media. By considering how Muslim women have been exploited as part of neo-imperial, state, and patriarchal discourses, the book charts possible—and unexpected—routes via which Muslim women might enact resistance. What is more, it asks the reader to consider how they, themselves, embody the role of witness to these resistant subjectivities, and how they might do so responsibly, with empathy and accountability.
Author: Avril Horner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748699139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
A re-assessment of the Gothic in relation to the female, the 'feminine', feminism and post-feminismThis collection of newly commissioned essays brings together major scholars in the field of Gothic studies in order to re-think the topic of 'Women and the Gothic'. The 14 chapters in this volume engage with debates about 'Female Gothic' from the 1970s and '80s, through second wave feminism, theorisations of gender and a long interrogation of the 'women' category as well as with the problematics of post-feminism, now itself being interrogated by a younger generation of women. The contributors explore Gothic works from established classics to recent films and novels from feminist and post-feminist perspectives. The result is a lively book that combines rigorous close readings with elegant use of theory in order to question some ingrained assumptions about women, the Gothic and identity. Key FeaturesRevitalises the long-running debate about women, the Gothic and identityEngages with the political agendas of feminism and post-feminismPrioritises the concerns of woman as reader, author and criticOffers fresh readings of both classic and recent Gothic works
Author: Eve Bennett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501331094
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
In the years following 9/11, American TV developed a preoccupation with apocalypse. Science fiction and fantasy shows ranging from Firefly to Heroes, from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica to Lost, envisaged scenarios in which world-changing disasters were either threatened or actually took place. During the same period numerous commentators observed that the American media's representation of gender had undergone a marked regression, possibly, it was suggested, as a consequence of the 9/11 attacks and the feelings of weakness and insecurity they engendered in the nation's men. Eve Bennett investigates whether the same impulse to return to traditional images of masculinity and femininity can be found in the contemporary cycle of apocalyptic series, programmes which, like 9/11 itself, present plenty of opportunity for narratives of damsels-in-distress and heroic male rescuers. However, as this book shows, whether such narratives play out in the expected manner is another matter.
Author: Sherri L. Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442277483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.
Author: Swathi Krishna S.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666902330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Gendered Violence in Public Spaces: Women’s Narratives of Travel in Neoliberal India examines the vulnerability of women in public spaces in India through an analysis of narrative representations ranging from emerging digital media, commercial Hindi films, and graphic narratives to accounts of real and lived experiences of women. In doing so, this collection initiates a scholarly discussion on manifold forms of emotional, mental, epistemic, and above all sexual violence female travelers face in male-dominated public spaces. Gendered Violence in Public Spaces therefore challenges contemporary readers to re-frame India’s public spaces against misogyny and gendered violence.
