You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book examines the multi-media explosion of contemporary political satire. Rooted in 18th century Augustan practice, satire’s indelible link with politics underlies today’s universal disgust with the ways of elected politicians. This study interrogates the impact of British and American satirical media on political life, with a special focus on political cartoons and the levelling humour of Australasian satirists.
Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. I...
Murdoch's Flagship provides the first in-depth overview of the Australian, mapping its uneven and uncharted progress across its first three decades. While the Fairfax and Packer media groups have received detailed historical coverage over the years, Rupert Murdoch's News Limited and the Australian have not been given the same systematic attention by historians. Denis Cryle draws on a vast amount of secondary print material, his own extensive interviews with past and present staff and a detailed reading of the Australian's newspaper files to capture the vitality of the newspaper over three seminal decades.
The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling challenges many established truths about popular literary classics by presenting an analysis of sixty Korean variations of The Journey to the West, a set which includes novels and poems, as well as films, comics, paintings, and dance performances dating from the 14th century until today. In contrast to the typical assumption that literary classics like The Journey to the West are stable texts with a single original, Barbara Wall approaches The Journey to the West as a dynamic text comprised of all its variations. She argues that all the creators of such variations, from Korean scholars in the 14th century to “boy bands” like Seventeen in the...
In Gender, Theatre and the Origins of Criticism, Marcie Frank explores the theoretical and literary legacy of John Dryden to a number of prominent women writers of the time. Frank examines the pre-eminence of gender, sexuality and the theatre in Dryden's critical texts that are predominantly rewritings of the work of his own literary precursors - Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Milton. She proposes that Dryden develops a native literary tradition that is passed on as an inheritance to his heirs - Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley - as well as their male contemporaries. Frank describes the development of criticism in the transition from a court-sponsored theatrical culture to one oriented toward a consuming public, with very different attitudes to gender and sexuality. This study also sets out to trace the historical origins of certain aspects of current criticism - the practices of paraphrase, critical self-consciousness and performativity.
This book argues that recent developments in contemporary comedy have changed not just the way we laugh but the way we understand the world. Drawing on a range of contemporary televisual, cinematic and digital examples, from Seinfeld and Veep to Family Guy and Chappelle’s Show, Holm explores how humour has become a central site of cultural politics in the twenty-first century. More than just a form of entertainment, humour has come to play a central role in the contemporary media environment, shaping how we understand ideas of freedom, empathy, social boundaries and even logic. Through an analysis of humour as a political and aesthetic category, Humour as Politics challenges older models of laughter as a form of dissent and instead argues for a new theory of humour as the cultural expression of our (neo)liberal moment.
Bringing together exciting new interdisciplinary work from emerging and established scholars in the UK and beyond, Litpop addresses the question: how has writing past and present been influenced by popular music, and vice versa? Contributions explore how various forms of writing have had a crucial role to play in making popular music what it is, and how popular music informs ’literary’ writing in diverse ways. The collection features musicologists, literary critics, experts in cultural studies, and creative writers, organised in three themed sections. ’Making Litpop’ explores how hybrids of writing and popular music have been created by musicians and authors. ’Thinking Litpop’ co...
While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Condé has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Condé’s work—history and globalization in La Belle Créole and Moi, Tituba sorcière...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des cœurs and Célanire cou-coupé, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversée de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale—this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Condé engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader’s interpretive habits.
Featuring cutting-edge essays by leading scholars, this collection formulates a new feminist theory of eighteenth-century women's satire.
This title examines the role of scepticism in initiating the idea of the sublime in early modern British literature. James Noggle draws on philosophy, intellectual history, and critical theory to illuminate the aesthetic ideology of Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester among other import ant writers of the period. "The Skeptical Sublime" compares the view of sublimity presented by these authors with that of the dominant, liberal tradition of 18th-century criticism to offer a new understanding of how these writers helped construct proto-aesthetic categories that stabilized British culture after years of civil war and revolution, while at the same time their scepticism allowed them to express ambivalence about the emerging social order