Introduction: Reimagining a New Spartacus

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony Augoustakis ◽  
Monica S. Cyrino
Keyword(s):  
Political Movements ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Cable Network ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter discusses the highly successful television series Spartacus, which aired on the premium cable network STARZ from 2010 to 2013. The story of Spartacus, the historical Thracian gladiator who led a slave uprising against the Roman Republican army from 73 to 71 BC, has inspired numerous receptions over the centuries in a variety of different media, while the figure of the rebel slave leader has often served as an icon of resistance against oppression in modern political movements and popular ideologies. Here, the chapter looks into the production history of the STARZ series and how the series itself treads familiar ground at the same time as it explores new territory.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik S. Gellman ◽  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Depression Era

This introductory chapter tells the story of how two preachers challenged racial divisions in the United States. Southern history, even American history generally, is too often told in white stories and black stories that seldom connect; yet the chapter asserts that the intertwined stories of Owen Whitfield and Claude Claude Williams challenges students of the history of the southern working class to take seriously the dynamic power and centrality of religious ideas in social and political movements, which raises new questions about the assumptions scholars have made about race, respectability, politics, and even gender in the Depression and World War II era. Their careers, in part, tell the story of the recovery of a southern common ground strong enough to support a working-class social movement for greater democracy in Depression-era America.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gray Cavender ◽  
Nancy C. Jurik
Keyword(s):  
Police Work ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Metropolitan Police ◽  
History Of ◽  
Police Procedural ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Strong Woman

This introductory chapter begins with a background on the television series Prime Suspect, which chronicles the life and career of Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren), a detective chief inspector and later a detective superintendent for the London Metropolitan Police. Beyond its worldwide popularity, Prime Suspect is a pathbreaking series because it centers a strong woman lead in a gritty portrayal within what had been an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated police procedural subgenre. The series has shaped also the police procedural subgenre by setting higher standards for conveying a sense of social realism in the coverage of police work and, more specifically, what media analysts call “forensic realism.” The remainder of the chapter presents a brief history of the crime genre and women's place as well as a brief history of how television has portrayed women more generally. It concludes with an overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Production

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Raven ◽  
Karen O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Great Majority ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Forms

This introductory chapter discusses the production history of the novel. The revolution in book production across all genres is dramatic. Before 1700 up to about 1,800 different printed titles were issued annually; by 1820 up to 5,500—and this is simply a crude title count that does not consider the huge increases in the edition sizes of certain types of publication, increases that escalated sharply after 1820. It was only in the 1810s that the production of literature, and notably the novel, temporarily faltered. The great majority of the new novels of 1819–20 carried either ‘novel’ or ‘tale’ in their title. Early nineteenth-century British reviewers and advertising booksellers accepted and promoted the ‘novel’ as a distinct literary category, even though it encompassed a great many narrative forms. By 1820, readers were able to enjoy an accumulation of critical studies of the novels and even accounts of their production history and domestic and foreign influences.

Early Cinema in Scotland

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Audience

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Homer's Daughters

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Christa Wolf ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Homeric Reception ◽  
First World

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses to both the Odyssey and the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer’s afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer’s footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of classics—as well as those in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing—will find much to interest them, while the volume’s concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.

History of Sexual Orientation and Mental Health

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Kristin A. Hancock ◽  
Douglas C. Haldeman
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
International Policy ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Bisexual ◽  
The Impact

Psychology’s understanding of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people has evolved, become more refined, and impacted the lives of LGB people in profound ways. This chapter traces the history of LGB psychology from the nineteenth century to the present and focuses on major events and the intersections of theory, psychological science, politics, and activism in the history of this field. It explores various facets of cultural and psychological history that include the pathologizing of homosexuality, the rise of psychological science and the political movements in the mid-twentieth century, and the major shifts in policy that ensued. The toll of the AIDS epidemic on the field is discussed as is the impact of psychological research on national and international policy and legislation.

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document