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Is It 'Cause It's Cool?
Even a global political watershed, such as the end of the Cold War, seems to have left a fundamental characteristic of cultural relations between the US and the rest of the world unchanged: American popular culture still stirs up emotion. American popular culture's products, artifacts, and practices entangle their consumers in affective encounters characterized by feelings of fascination, excitement, or even wholesale rejection. What is it that continues to make 'American' popular culture 'cool?' Which role does 'cool' play in the consumers' affective encounters with 'America?' This volume of essays offers new insights on the post-Cold War dissemination of American popular culture, exploring the manifold ways in which 'cool' has emerged as an elusive, yet determining, factor of an American culture gone global. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 13)
US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions
This collection takes stock of current discourses in American studies on the political valence of American utopias, be they as religious diasporas or as socialist experiments, fantastic or realist, successful or failed. The included essays take into account the spatiality of utopias (especially in their visionary scope), analyze currents in literary utopias, and look at dystopian visions in literature. This volume strives to keep alive the long tradition of writers, artists, and scholars who warned against imminent disasters and envisioned ways to counter such ruinous bearings. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 17) [Subject: Sociology, Literary Studies]
Contemporary Quality TV
Ever since HBO's slogan "It's Not TV, It's HBO" launched in 1996, so-called quality television has reached a new level of marketing, recognition, and indeed quality. With other networks imitating the formula, the "HBO effect" triggered a wave of creative output. This turn to quality set off two shifts: (a) Contemporary television staged an international resurgence of the auteur, and (b) America transformed into an "on-demand nation." The chapters in this volume analyze new television lifestyles including marginalized perspectives, fan participation, and an emerging nostalgia correlated with trash aesthetics.
Cheeky Fictions
Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. It gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of humour in a wide range of cultural texts.
Pioneer African American Educators in Washington, D.C.: Anna J. Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Eva B. Dykes
Anna J. Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Eva B. Dykes shaped the educational landscape in Washington, D.C., in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These three pioneer educators serve as examples to describe the societal circles they were involved in. The many facets of their educational achievements are analyzed in the context of the educational elite of Washington. Cooper, Terrell, and Dykes not only had to live with race discrimination but also with gender discrimination. Unpublished archive material is used to illustrate how they interacted and how they treated each other. Marina Bacher is a scholar, author, and educator. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 18) [Subject: Education, Sociology, History]
Space Oddities
"Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City" approaches a space (and place) central to the American imagination-the city. In particular, this volume discusses the paradoxes of American cities and American urban life. In this way, the book critically engages with the paradoxes of the American identity, embodied by cultural practices in, and cultural representations of, urban life in the United States. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 16) [Subject: Sociology, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies]
The EmBodyment of American Culture
American culture has literally become fixated on the body at the same time that the body has emerged as a key term within critical and cultural theory. Contributions thus address the body as a site of the cultural construction of various identities, which are themselves enacted, negotiated, or subverted through bodily practices. Contributions come from literary and cultural studies, film and media studies, history and sociology, and women studies, and are representative of many theoretical positions, hermeneutic, historical, structuralist, feminist, postmodernist. They deal with representations and discursifications of the body in a broad array of texts, in literature, the visual arts, theater, the performing arts, film and mass media, science and technology, as well as in various cultural practices.
Beauty Ideals, Appearances, and Body Images in Disney’s Feature Films
Disney films reflect the current values and beliefs of society and have the power to influence their audiences in the perception of what is beautiful, and whether appearance does or does not matter. This book gives an overview of beauty ideals, body images, and appearances in Disney’s feature films. Seven main films are chosen for this analysis to allow for a comparison across time: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Cinderella (1950), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Frozen (2013). The survey determines to what extent Disney films make use of the beauty-goodness stereotype – the equation of appearance a...
Transatlantic Television Drama
"This collection explores the current wave of US/UK television dramas, focusing on industry strategies, performance styles, issues of 'quality,' and audience receptions. It covers key programs including Black Mirror, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones and Sherlock. Issues of national identity, streaming services, and transnational fan cultures are all explored"
Border-Crossing and Comedy at the Théâtre Italien, 1716–1723
How do nationalized stereotypes inform the reception and content of the migrant comedian’s work? How do performers adapt? What gets lost (and found) in translation? Border-Crossing and Comedy at the Théâtre Italien, 1716-1723 explores these questions in an early modern context. When a troupe of commedia dell’arte actors were invited by the French crown to establish a theatre in Paris, they found their transition was anything but easy. They had to learn a new language and adjust to French expectations and demands. This study presents their story as a dynamic model of coping with the challenges of migration, whereby the actors made their transnational identity a central focus of their comedy. Relating their work to popular twenty-first century comedians, this book also discusses the tools and ideas that contextualize the border-crossing comedian’s work—including diplomacy, translation, improvisation, and parody—across time.
