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This collection of essays examines the theme of liminality in Irish literature and culture against the philosophical discourse of modernity and focuses on representations of liminality in contemporary Irish literature, art and film in a variety of contexts.
This volume compares different regional perspectives on the national and democracy-building aims of individual states. It confronts discourses about national states to regional perspectives on the past as well as the current political and social landscape. Why are we observing calls for national identity right now? What are the roots of this development? How can a Central European identity be shaped when national perspectives are prevalent? The book’s first part analyses social and political processes that shaped nation-states in the Central European region and shows divergent trends of individual states when it comes to defining a regional approach of the Visegrád Group (Poland, Czech Re...
The so-called Democratic Antifascist Youth Movement “Nashi” represents a crucial case of a post-Orange government-organized formation whose values have broad support in Russian society. Yet, at the same time, in view of the movement’s public scandals, Nashi was also a phenomenon bringing to the fore public reluctance to accept all implications of Putin’s new system. The Russian people’s relatively widespread support for his patriotic policies and conservative values has been evident, but this support is not easily extended to political actors aligned to these values. Using discourse analysis, this book identifies socio-political factors that created obstacles to Nashi’s communication strategies. The book understands Nashi as anticipating an “ideal youth” within the framework of official national identity politics and as an attempt to mobilize largely apolitical youngsters in support of the powers that be. It demonstrates how Nashi’s ambivalent societal position was the result of a failed attempt to reconcile incompatible communicative demands of the authoritarian state and apolitical young.
In cognitive research, metaphors have been shown to help us imagine complex, abstract, or invisible ideas, concepts, or emotions. Contributors to this book argue that metaphors occur not only in language, but in audio visual media well. This is all the more evident in entertainment media, which strategically "sell" their products by addressing their viewers’ immediate, reflexive understanding through pictures, sounds, and language. This volume applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those moving images.
This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana, or "Hurrem Sultan," was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards "the Other," and they investigate her image in a wide variety of sources, r...
Since its introduction in the early 1960s, Spanish-language television in the United States has grown in step with the Hispanic population. Industry and demographic projections forecast rising influence through the 21st century. This book traces U.S. Spanish-language television’s development from the 1960s to 2013, illustrating how business, regulation, politics, demographics and technological change have interwoven during a half century of remarkable change for electronic media. Spanish-language media play key social, political and economic roles in U.S. society, connecting many Hispanics to their cultures of origin, each other, and broader U.S. society. Yet despite the population’s increasing impact on U.S. culture, in elections and through an estimated $1.3 trillion in spending power in 2014, this is the first comprehensive academic source dedicated to the medium and its history. The book combines information drawn from the business press and trade journals with industry reports and academic research to provide a balanced perspective on the origins, maturation and accelerated growth of a significant ethnic-oriented medium.
This book analyzes the challenges facing public service media management in the face of ongoing technological developments and changing audience behaviors. It connects models, strategies, concepts, and managerial theories with emerging approaches to public media practices through an examination of media services (e.g. blogs, social networks, search engines, content aggregators) and the online performance of traditional public media organizations. Contributors identify the most relevant and useful approaches, those likely to encourage creativity, interaction, and the development of innovative content and services, and discuss how such innovation can underpin the continuation or expansion of public service media in the changing mediascape.
With the televised events of 1989, territories of Eastern and Central Europe that had been marked as impenetrable and inaccessible to the Western gaze exploded into visibility. As the narratives of the Cold War crumbled, new narratives emerged and new geographies were produced on and by American television. Using an understudied archive of American news broadcasts, and tracing their flashes and echoes through travel guides and narratives of return written by Eastern European-Americans, this book explores American ways of seeing and mapping communism’s disintegration and the narratives articulated around post-communist sites and subjects.
The politico-economic reforms launched during the late twentieth century in post-Soviet Russia have led to contradictory and ambiguous results. The new economic environment and mode of governance that emerged have been subjected to serious criticism. What were the causes of these developments? Were they unavoidable for Russia due to specific factors grounded in the country’s previous experiences? Or were they an intended result of actions taken by the leaders of the country during the last few decades? The authors of this book share neither a deterministic approach, which implies that Russia is bound to fail because of the nature of its economic and political evolution, nor a voluntarist approach, which implies that these failures were caused only by the incompetence and/or malicious intentions of its leaders. Instead, this study offers a different framework for the analysis of political and economic developments in present-day Russia. It is based on four ‘i’s—ideas, interests, institutions, and illusions.
International Exposure demonstrates the wealth of desires woven into the fabric of European history: desires about empire and nation, about self and other, about plenty and dearth. By documenting the diverse meanings of pornography, senior scholars from across disciplines show the ways that sexuality became central to the individual, to the nation, and to the transnational character of modern society. The ten essays in the volume engage a rich array of topics, including obscenity in the German states, censorship in France’s Third Republic, “she-male” internet porn, the rise of incestuous longings in England, the place of the Hungarian video revolution in the global market, and the poli...