Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

The chapters in this volume are a mix ofinterdisciplinary Zimbabwean scholars of linguistics, performance studies, religion, history, communication and media studies, unravelling Mtukudzi as a fighter for human rights and justice who subtly critiqued political systems and practices. It concludes that Mtukudzi strove to be a cultural worker who used the power of language through music to contribute towards the rehabilitation of a battered African identity.

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.

This book discusses men’s friendships in relation to queer, discursive, and intersectional feminist theories. It analyses stories of intimacy, touch, hugs, and conversations, connecting these with current discussions within feminism and critical masculinity studies on “new” men, men’s political activism, and how friendships are lived and conceptualised in relation to heteronormative relationship ideals. Drawing on individual and dyadic interviews with middle-class Swedish men, all engaged in or sympathetic to feminist issues in some sense, this volume shows that Swedish gender equality ideologies as well as feminist, therapeutic, neo-liberal, and individualist discourses prevalent in the Western world structured the men’s friendships and their engagement with gender politics. Chapters cover friendship temporalities, gendered friendship ideals, friendship as men’s politics, and friendship as performed in interaction. Bridging the literatures of feminist research and friendship, the author points to tensions and contradictions in pro-feminist men’s political projects and in contemporary masculine positions.

This book focuses on the characters that populate the Game of Thrones universe and on one of the most salient features of their interaction: violence and warfare. It analyses these questions from a multidisciplinary perspective that is chiefly based on Classical Studies. The book is divided into two sections. The first section explores Martin’s characters as the mainstay of both the novels and the TV series, since the author has peopled his universe with three-dimensional intriguing characters that resonate with the reader/audience. The second section is devoted to violence and warfare, both pervasive in the Game of Thrones universe. In particular, the TV series’ depiction of violence is explicit, going beyond the limits that have seldom been traversed in primetime television i.e. the execution of Ned Stark, the “Red Wedding” and “Battle of the Bastards”. In the Game of Thrones universe, violence is not only restricted to warfare but is an everyday occurrence, a result of the social and gender inequalities characterising the world created by Martin.

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism—in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space—as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy’s treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress assimultaneously a figure for ‘captive Greece’ and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome’s competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome’s colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy’s rhetoric of orientalism.

This book explores closely related aspects of the historical study of humour. It challenges much that has been taken for granted in a field of study for which history has been marginal. It disputes the conventional genealogical view that humour theory dates from antiquity and outlines an alternative conceptual history. It critically examines the nostrum that humour is universal. It then explores the methodological difficulties in treating both verbal and non-verbal humour historically, dealing with contextualisation, intentionality, translation and reception. It explores the variable relationships between satire and definition and concludes with a detailed case study from recent history: the iconic Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister television comedies. These are commonly seen as realistic, but better understood as presenting popularised theories for satiric and propagandistic effect. Only in their treatment of language can we assess a putative political realism. The satires are often highly perceptive but largely dependent on misleading and inadequate theories of political discourse.

This book offers a novel, grounded-theory approach to the study of online comments about Donald Trump and the USA in countries with a turbulent relation with America: China, Mexico and Russia.

Slavtcheva-Petkova advocates for a departure from Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere and democratic deliberative framework, introducing instead the concept of post-deliberative public spheres. The book provides a qualitative thematic analysis via the constant comparison method, coupled with quantitate content analysis of more than 2200 social media comments posted from Trump’s election in 2016 until July 2020. Three empirical chapters are devoted to the countries under study, showing how it is possible to map the comments onto a spectrum of authoritarianism/censored media to democracy/free media. Slavtcheva-Petkova argues that existence and strength of an underpinning ideology and the scope that ideology leaves for constructive political discussions online is of key importance, exploring themes such as identity, patriotism and populism; democracy; power and responsibility.

Timely and innovative, ‘Trump’s America Online’ astutely displays how post-deliberative public spheres are valuable spaces for political talk despite the challenges they face across the globe.

This book reflects on time, space and culture in the Game of Thrones universe. It analyses both the novels and the TV series from a multidisciplinary perspective ultimately aimed at highlighting the complexity, eclecticism and diversity that characterises Martin’s world. The book is divided into three thematic sections. The first section focuses on space—both the urban and natural environment—and the interaction between human beings and their surroundings. The second section follows different yet complementary approaches to Game of Thrones from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. The final section addresses the linguistic and translation implications of the Game of Thrones universe, as well as its didactic uses. This book is paired with a second volume that focuses on the characters that populate Martin’s universe, as well as on one of the ways in which they often interact—violence and warfare—from the same multidisciplinary perspective.

This book represents the first extended consideration of contemporary crime fiction as a European phenomenon. Understanding crime fiction in its broadest sense, as a transmedia practice, and offering unique insights into this practice in specific European countries and as a genuinely transcontinental endeavour, this book argues that the distinctiveness of the form can be found in its related historical and political inquiries. It asks how the genre’s excavation of Europe’s history of violence and protest in the twentieth century is informed by contemporary political questions. It also considers how the genre’s progressive reimagining of new identities forged at the crossroads of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is offset by its bleaker assessment of the corrosive effects of entrenched social inequalities, political corruption, and state violence. The result is a rich, vibrant collection that shows how crime fiction can help us better understand the complex relationship between Europe’s past, present, and future. 

Seven chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. 

This book analyzes the different policy challenges that Pakistani women face and makes regionally relevant policy recommendations across different areas of private and public life, drawing on secondary data from nationally representative surveys and primary data from qualitative interviews. These areas include family safety, housing adequacy, food security and nutritional adequacy, environment and disaster protection, educational development, employment and formal sector inclusion, and health security. The author examines how the history, culture, and political climate of Pakistan have shaped social policy for women, interrogates gaps in social protections for women, and analyzes the limitations for past interventions. This text also looks at collaboration across South Asian countries, as well as using religion, social media, financing, and a new model of governance for comprehensive coverage and sustainable social policy for women. 

This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and policymakers with focus on women’s and gender studies and policy studies in South Asia.

This study presents Moby-Dick as a novel with three distinct but interconnecting stories: Ishmael’s, which he shares ten years after it has taken place; Ahab’s, which is Ishmael's account of the memorable captain of a whaling ship; and a third which centres on whales and whaling, which has not received significant critical attention. While each of these perspectives compete for prominence in the narrative, Ahab and Ishmael's stories have often distracted from the vital significance of the whaling narrative as what outlasts Ahab’s obsessive mission. Catalano rights this wrong by coming to a strikingly original and thought-provoking conclusion which becomes the heart of the book's argument: “the unity of Melville’s book comes, first, from the way the numerous literary, philosophical, and religious reflections are rooted in those magnificent beings, whales and in the men and ships that pursue them, and, second, in the way these reflections illuminate our own lives.”

This book examines Thomas Hardy’s writing in both prose and poetry, focusing on issues of perception, ‘being’, class and environment. It illustrates the ways in which Hardy represents a social world which serves as a ‘horizon’ for the individual and explores the dialectic between the perceptible world and human consciousness. Ebbatson demonstrates how, in Hardy’s oeuvre, modern life becomes alienated from its roots in rural life – individual freedom is achieved in works like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure or The Woodlanders at the cost of personal insecurity and a deepening sense of homelessness. However, this development occurs against the marginalisation of dialect forms of speech. This book also explores how Hardy’s impressionist vision serves to undermine the prevailing conventions of plot structure.

This book brings together research from medical and film archives to illustrate the cultural impact of film and literature in its relationship to the discourse of plastic surgery in the 1920s. This different take on reading the body after the First World War enables students of multiple disciplines, and readers interested in both Hollywood and post-war culture, to understand some of the complexities of medical interventions gained after the First World War and the way in which they filtered into the world of Hollywood film making. It also allows readers who may not be familiar with these two 1920s stars to access the films of Lon Chaney and the books and films of Elinor Glyn and gain new insights into 1920s visual culture. For ease of readership, the book is organised so that each of the main chapters focuses on a particular film (either Lon Chaney or Elinor Glyn). This is particularly useful for use in the classroom or for online education. Readers can refer to the film directly, aided by illustrations of frames from the films. This book tells the story of how two stars of Hollywood film transformed their character’s faces on screen through a close reading of three films in the 1920s. It reveals how they applied their embodied knowledge of surgery and surgical procedures to broaden their audience’s emotional and intellectual understanding of the treatment of deformity and disability.

This book examines the development of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) in China through the angle of Chinese Theatre, xiqu. It focuses on the political and socio-economic transition period at the turn of the 21^st century, as China evolves from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’, highlighting associated class reconstruction and cultural production and consumption. There are many forms of Chinese Theatre, the most popular one throughout Chinese history to date is the sing-song drama, collectively refers to as xiqu, which currently has over 300 regional styles across China. In 2014, President Xi Jinping’s Beijing Talk on Arts and Literature, which serves as China’s latest Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideological direction and cultural policy, stressed that ‘the future of Chinese cultural and creative industries is to be anchored on traditional art forms, such as xiqu’. Such Chinese cultural and creative industry distinction will be addressed in this book.

Do you want to design the branding for global clients for a PR Agency? Be the lead anchor for your favorite network sports program? Make headlines by investigating corruption that leads to social change? How do you market yourself for these jobs? This book takes a storytelling approach to help prepare readers for a successful college career in the media industries: public relations, advertising, sports media, broadcast, and journalism.  The book begins with the basics to help orient readers to college life and offer tips for coursework and campus media. Then, the author provides insights from over 14 years working with interns in public relations and his scholarship on internships to prepare readers to apply for competitive internships. The book teaches readers to sift through the fine print of internship and job postings to understand your role and responsibilities, help you prepare for the implicit and explicit expectations at the work site, and become a marketable commodity that can make you an attractive candidate for your ideal career.

This book offers the first book-length study of user-generated, social media-based true crime content. The book considers the large and varied true crime community, outlining their at times contradictory needs and desires, from those who wish to partake in acts of sleuthing and fannish behaviours, to those who seek spaces to articulate marginalised opinions and challenge ethically problematic practices. The collection is divided into three sections: “The Ethics of Watching and Doing,” which concerns the ethical pitfalls of true crime content on social media; “Participatory Culture,” which deals with the acts of participatory culture that define not only contemporary true crime fandom but also nearly all digitally-based fan activities; and “True Crime Communities,” which considers the enthusiasts who both consume true crime and seek out others online to share their interests.

This book will appeal to those researching the true crime genre, fan practices, contemporary social media usage and the ethics of screened representation.