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Despite efforts of contemporary reformers to curb the availability of dime novels, series books, and paperbacks, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes reveals how many readers used them as means of resistance and how fictional characters became models for self-empowerment. These literary genres, whose value has long been underestimated, provide fascinating insight into the formation of American popular culture and identity. Through these mass-produced, widely read books, Deadwood Dick, Old Sleuth, and Jessie James became popular heroes that fed the public’s imagination for the last western frontier, detective tales, and the myth of the outlaw. Women, particularly those who were poo...
"A valuable reference guide for film collections and LGBTQIA+ studies." — Library Journal, Starred Review The depictions of LGBTQIA+ characters in film have always varied immensely. However, the negative depictions often seem to outweigh the positive, perhaps because of the hurt they inspire or perhaps because they regrettably outnumber the positive films. The Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film explores works from the past fifty years in order to not only discuss how LGBTQIA+ characters are portrayed in American film, but also how these portrayals affect viewers. Contributors to this valuable reference include film and media scholars, gender studies scholars, journalists,...
A highly original collection of essays, demonstrating how comic books can be used as primary sources in the teaching and understanding of American history.
(series copy)These encyclopedic companions are browsable, invaluable individual guides to authors and their works. Useful for students, but written with the general reader in mind, they are clear, concise, accessible, and supply the basic cultural, historical, biographical and critical information so crucial toan appreciation and enjoyment of the primary works. Each is arranged in an A-Z fashion and presents and explains the terms, people, places, and concepts encountered in the literary worlds of James Joyce, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.As a keen explorer of the mundane material of everyday life, James Joyce ranks high in the canon of modernist writers. He is arguably the most influential writer of the twentieth-century, and may be the most read, studied, and taught of all modern writers. The James Joyce A-Z is the ideal companionto Joyce's life and work. Over 800 concise entries relating to all aspects of Joyce are gathered here in one easy-to-use volume of impressive scope.
Is heroism possible for everyone? Should it be? What kinds of stories do we tell when we talk about heroes and what do these stories reveal about how we view ourselves? This book takes up these questions and more by reflecting on twenty-first century American television shows. Among the shows examined are Only Murders in the Building, Game of Thrones, The Good Lord Bird, The Boys, and Severance. What we find is an entertainment landscape unsure about what a hero is or even what qualifies as heroic. In a nation uncertain about heroism, we see a dramatic rise in the popularity of the anti-hero and even in worlds without heroes. This fragmented variety highlights how the American political mind...
Historical novelist William Gilmore Simms first published The Forayers in 1855 at the peak of his reputation and ability. Simms had set out to create a prose epic through a series of linked novels detailing American history and struggles from early colonization to the mid-nineteenth century. The Forayers, which was the sixth book in his series of eight Revolutionary War novels set in the South, describes events around Orangeburg, South Carolina, before the Battle of Eutaw Springs (itself covered in this novel's sequel, Eutaw). It features such characters as Hell-fire Dick, a hardhearted, foul-mouthed looter under Tory protection. Simms hoped his readers would find this book "a bold, brave, masculine story; frank, ardent, vigorous; faithful to humanity." He described it to a friend as "fresh and original" and wrote that "the characterization [is] as truthful as forcible. It is at once a novel of society & a romance."
This book is a study of how transfictional and transmedia storytelling emerges in the nineteenth century and how the period’s receptive practices anticipate the receptive practices of fandom and transmedia storytelling franchises in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The central claim is that the serialized, periodical, and dramatic media environment of the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century in Great Britain trained audiences to perceive the continuous identity of characters and worlds across disparate texts, illustrations, plays, and songs by creators other than the earliest originating author. The book contributes to fan studies, transmedia studies, and nineteenth-century periodical studies while also interrogating the nature of fictional character.