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Thomas Chandler Haliburton was perhaps the only Canadian writer whose name was a household word in nineteenth-century Canada. The ten papers in this volume reappraise the historical, geographical, political and literary contexts within which Haliburton lived and worked. His letters, his historical books, the Club papers and Sam Slick sketches are all included in these valuable and lively criticisms. Published in English.
L’ouvrage rassemble des communications bilingues (anglais-français) issues du colloque tenu à l’université de Rouen sur la représentation filmique de la criminalité aux États-Unis de 1929 à 1951. Les liens d’Hollywood avec le crime organisé (mafia urbaine, grand banditisme …) posent diverses questions : l’héroïsation hollywoodienne du gangster, devenu le vecteur d’un nouveau système de valeurs, ne tend-elle pas à apparenter la transgression à un jeu ? L’esthétique de la violence n’accroît-elle pas la fascination des jeunes pour toute déviance, légitimant la mort virtuelle-réelle comme unique solution en cas de conflit ? Les studios hollywoodiens fondent-ils leur puissance et leur légitimité sur la diffusion de valeurs illicites ? Le recueil montre tout d’abord que la diffusion de ces nouveaux comportements répond à des choix économiques ; puis il aborde les rapports entre idéologie et société, traite ensuite de la censure et enfin réexamine l’esthétique de la violence.
In France, Belgium, and other Francophone countries, comic strips—called bande dessinee or “BD” in French—have long been considered a major art form capable of addressing a host of contemporary issues. Among French-speaking intelligentsia, graphic narratives were deemed worthy of canonization and critical study decades before the academy and the press in the United States embraced comics. The place that BD holds today, however, belies the contentious political route the art form has traveled. In Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic, author Joel E. Vessels examines the trek of BD from it being considered a fomenter of rebellion, to a medium suitable only for semi-literates, ...
This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Edgar Allan Poe's work and life. Contributions provide a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and controversial American writers. The essays, specially tailored to the needs of undergraduates, examine all of Poe's major writings, his poetry, short stories and criticism, and place his work in a variety of literary, cultural and political contexts. They situate his imaginative writings in relation to different modes of writing: humor, Gothicism, anti-slavery tracts, science fiction, the detective story, and sentimental fiction. Three chapters examine specific works: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Raven', and 'Ulalume'. The volume features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading, and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.
Although he called himself merely a "printer" in his will, Benjamin Franklin could have also called himself a diplomat, a doctor, an electrician, a frontier general, an inventor, a journalist, a legislator, a librarian, a magistrate, a postmaster, a promoter, a publisher—and a humorist. John Adams wrote of Franklin, "He had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was pleasant and delightful... [and] talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill, to the promotion of moral and political truth." In Benjamin Franklin's Humor, author Paul M. Zall shows how one of America's founding fathers used humor to further both personal and national interests. Early in...
Did you know that Pocahontas probably never fell in love with John Smith, as the Disney and other film versions of those events pretend? That Godzilla was originally an anti-American and anti-nuclear movie, heavily cut and supplemented with new material? That Zorro was not created by an American author but derived from the much older Mexican struggle for independence? That Anna and the King was largely invented? That the myth of the sexually eager Hula girls is based on misunderstandings by the first explorers? That Black Hawk Down and many other war movies were censored and indirectly subsidized by the Pentagon? Screening Difference takes us on a fascinating voyage through major movie block...
This fifth revised edition features approximately 1,900 items, most of which are annotated. It addresses several interdisciplinary studies that have become prominent in the last decade, especially on popular culture, racial and other minorities, Native Americans and Chicanos, and literary regionalism. It allots more space to computer aids, science fiction, children's literature, literature of the sea, film and literature, and linguistic studies of American English and includes a new section on psychology. The appendix lists the biography of each of 135 deceased American authors. ISBN 0-8223-0592-5 : $22.50 (For use only in the library).
Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.
Contributors to this volume address the issue of the representation of warfare, in an attempt to assess the veracity or mendacity of war images and their probable impact upon the sequence of events. War images may trigger unfathomable horror or conversely and paradoxically attain sublimity. The margin is sometimes narrow between ethics and aesthetics, let alone the almost irrepressible shift from information to propaganda.
"A concise and intelligent synthesis of what we know and think about Hitchcock and a road map to future work on the subject. . . . There is no complete index to Hitchcock's career like this one and critics and historians will mine Sloan's work with enormous profit. . . . The 'Critical Survey' section constitutes an invaluable contribution to the project of metacriticism."—Matthew Bernstein, author of Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent