Popular entertainment, 1776–1895

Author(s):  
Dave Russell
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
Quinlan Miller

This article reconstructs queer popular culture as a way of exploring media production studies as a trans history project. It argues that queer and trans insights into gender are indispensible to feminist media studies. The article looks at The Ugliest Girl in Town series (ABC, 1968–69), a satire amplifying a purported real-life fad in flat chests, short haircuts, and mod wigs, to restore texture to the everyday landscape of popular entertainment. Approaching camp as a genderqueer practice, the article presents the program as one of many indications of simultaneously queer and trans representation in the new media moment of the late 1960s. Behind-the-scenes visions of excavated archival research inform an analysis of the series as a feminist text over and against its trans misogyny, which evaluates and ranks women based on their looks, bodies, and appearance while excessively sexualizing and even more stringently appraising, policing, and punishing trans women, women perceived to be trans, and oppositional forms of femininity. The program captures both the means of gender regulation and detachment from it, the experience of gender embodiment, and the promise of presenting and being perceived as many genders. Ugly is an awful word in the way it is usually wielded, but it can be reclaimed. Examining this rarely cited and often misconstrued Screen Gems series helps to demonstrate a more equitable distribution of creative credit for queer trans content across the television industry and the subcultures it commodified in the 1960s.


Author(s):  
Annie McClanahan

Dead Pledges is a study of our contemporary culture of debt. Examining novels, poems, artworks, photographs, and films produced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, this book aims to show how US cultural texts have grappled with the rise and fall of the financialized consumer credit economy. It argues that debt is such a ubiquitous yet elusive social form that we can most clearly understand it by looking at how our culture has sought to represent it. Whether popular entertainment or avant-garde art, post-crisis cultural texts allow us to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. Across this range of sites, this book offers an account of the theoretical and political consequences of debt: how it affects our ideas of personhood and morality; how it deploys a language of irrational behavior and risky excess; how it transforms our relationship to property and possession. Bringing together economic history, debt theory, and cultural analysis, Dead Pledges demonstrates how our understanding of the economy can be illuminated by culture. What is at stake in our contemporary culture of debt is not just our measures of economic credibility but also the limits of our imaginative credulity; not just our account of economic character but also our literary characters; not just the money we see but also the way we see money; not just how we pay but also how we imagine getting payback.


Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee

The recent upturn in biblically based films in Anglophone cinema is the departure point for this Afterword reflecting on the Bible’s impact on popular entertainment and literature in early modern England. Providing a survey of the book’s themes, and drawing together the central arguments, the discussion reminds that literary writers not only read and used the Bible in different ways to different ends, but also imbibed and scrutinized dominant interpretative principles and practices in their work. With this in mind, the Afterword outlines the need for further research into the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.


2015 ◽  
pp. 189-211
Author(s):  
Toby Miller ◽  
William Boddy ◽  
Jane Shattuc ◽  
Rod Brookes ◽  
K. J. Donnelly ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Brooks McNamara

Author(s):  
Chiara Faggella

Between the years 1922 and 1943, Italian Fascism revealed quite an ambivalent attitude towards lifestyle.[1] While the regime tried to impose standards of nationalistic moderation, popular entertainment of the time reveals that different aspects of culture never surrendered completely to the diktats of the regime. This article discusses the ways in which two films, Il Signor Max (Astra Film, 1937) and I Grandi Magazzini (Amato-Era Film, 1939) can provide a perspective into the consumer culture of Fascist Italy and its ambivalences. By presenting recurrent references to lifestyle commodities and fashion, the experiences of consumption in the two films take center stage in spite of the regime’s campaigns for modesty.   [1] The use of the capital ‘f’ is employed to specifically indicate the totalitarian regime led by Benito Mussolini, which occurred in Italy between the years 1922 and 1943, and to distinguish it from additional national variations (e.g. Spanish Falangism).


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