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This book examines narratives of dementia in contemporary literary texts, studying what is now a pressing issue with deep political, economic, and social implications for many ageing societies. As part of the increasing visibility of dementia in social and cultural life, these narratives pose ethical, aesthetic, and political questions about subjectivity, agency, and care that help us to interrogate the cultural discourse of dementia. Contemporary Narratives of Dementia is a seminal book that offers a sustained examination of a wide range of literary narratives, from auto/biographies and detective fiction, to children’s books and comic books. With its wide-reaching theoretical and critical...
This edited volume rethinks Masculinity Studies by breaking away from the notion of the perpetual crisis of masculinity. It argues that not enough has been done to distinguish patriarchy from masculinity and proposes to detox masculinity by offering a collection of positive representations of men in fictional and non-fictional texts. The editors show how ideas of hegemonic and toxic masculinity have been too fixed on the exploration of dominance and subservience, and too little on the men (and the male characters in fiction) who behave following other ethical, personal and socially accepted patterns. Bringing together research from different periods and genres, this collection provides broad, multidisciplinary insights into alternative representations of masculinity.
Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century. The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts...
This insightful volume details the implementation and challenges of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), developed in the UK to ensure equal access to higher education for all social classes. It posits that a modern higher education institution requires a robust set of mechanisms - specifically mentorship, leadership, and research - to create high-quality teaching and learning. Noted contributors pose and answer key questions about the TEF in such areas as solution-focused teaching, mentoring for the job market, and social science curriculum development, using best practice examples in the field. These ideas and strategies carry great potential to improve the caliber of teaching and lear...
Trained as a cultural historian, Thomas R. Cole is one of the most influential scholars of his generation, with his work moving beyond and impacting many other fields and disciplines. His work includes The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Cole also published No Color Is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston, creating along with the book an accompanying film, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, which was nominated for a regional Emmy and a National Humanities Medal. Cole created a number of other films as well. In all of his work, there is an emphasis on religion, spirituality, and moral meaning. Cole is also a Jewish spiritual director, and this work has become a major focus for him in retirement. This edited volume engages or responds to Cole’s work, which spans cultural history, oral history, aging studies, film, medical humanities, religious studies, and more. As such, this book is not about Cole per se, but the impact of his ideas and subsequent inspirations.
How has popular film, television and fiction responded to the realities of an ageing Western population? This volume analyses this field of representation to argue that, while celebrations of ageing as an inspirational journey are increasing, most depictions still focus on decline and deterioration.
In this volume, Deckard analyzes authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera to make a materialist study of the relation between paradise myths and the ideologies and economies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in literature from Mexico, Zanzibar and Sri Lanka.
Memory loss is not always viewed purely as a contingent neurobiological process present in an ageing population; rather, it is frequently related to larger societal issues and political debates. This edited volume examines how different media and genres – novels, auto/biographical writings, documentary as well as fictional films and graphic memoirs – represent dementia for the sake of critical explorations of memory, trauma and contested truths. In ten analytical chapters and one piece of graphic art, the contributors examine the ways in which what might seem to be the individual, ahistorical diseases of dementia are used in contemporary cultural texts to represent and respond to violent historical and political events – ranging from the Holocaust to postcolonial conditions – all of which can prove difficult to remember. Combining approaches from literary studies with insights from memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, the critical medical humanities and media, film and comics studies, this volume explores the politics of dementia and incites new debates on cultures of remembrance, while remaining attentive to the lived reality of dementia.
Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through...