scholarly journals Nelly or Ellen? Revamping the first English actresses in contemporary popular culture

Sederi ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Laura Martínez-García
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Women ◽  
Public Imagination

The first British actresses have been the focus of extensive scholarly study, transposing the boundaries of academic life and irrupting in popular culture and becoming a part of the public imagination and folklore. This paper studies the perception we have inherited of “Pretty, Witty Nell,” probably the best-known actress of the Restoration, through the analysis of two novels—Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress and Gillian Bagwell’s The Darling Strumpet—that reconstruct Gwyn’s life turning the “Protestant Whore” into a learned lady and a devoted mother. This revamping of her figure not only entails the erasure of the subversive potential of actresses’ break with the public-masculine/private-feminine dichotomy, but it also works as an attempt at neutralizing the threat that these “public” women pose to the gender roles that became normative in the seventeenth century and that are still seen as such nowadays.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Maria Monk ◽  
People Today

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.

Leonardo's Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kemp ◽  
Robert B. Simon ◽  
Margaret Dalivalle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Auction House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
Media Spectacle ◽  
Art Dealers ◽  
Public Imagination

In Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts the ‘Three Salvateers’—Robert Simon, Martin Kemp and Margaret Dalivalle—give a first-hand account of the discovery of the lost Renaissance masterpiece; from its purchase for $1,175 in a New Orleans auction house in 2005, to the worldwide media spectacle of its sale to a Saudi prince for $450 million in 2017. A behind-the-scenes view of the painstaking processes of identification, consultation, scientific analysis, conservation, and archival research that underpinned the attribution of the painting to Leonardo, the book presents a consideration of the place of the painting in Leonardo’s body of work. Exploring the meaning of the painting in terms of Renaissance theology, it considers the identity of its original patron or intended recipient. Unravelling networks of early modern art dealers and collectors in Europe, it traces the emerging reception of Leonardo during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in Enlightenment Britain that the idea of Leonardo as artist–scientist took hold of the public imagination. This book examines the ‘invention’ of Leonardo through the unique prism of the Stuart courts. The documented presence of three paintings of Christ attributed to Leonardo in the vicinity of the seventeenth-century British Royal Collection is both extraordinary and perplexing. Today, Leonardo’s five-hundred-year-old Salvator has not yet disclosed its secret history.

Dark-Skinned Love Stories

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-309
Author(s):  
Robin M. Boylorn
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Personal Story ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
Interdisciplinary Scholarship ◽  
Public Imagination

In recent years academic scholarship and the public imagination has focused on the love lives (or lack thereof) of black women. In response and reaction to the recent so-called black love epidemic I interrogate claims about black women's failure at love and critique the ways that black women are often blamed for their cultural positionality. Framing my personal story with Toni Morrison's fictional character Pecola Breedlove, I discuss the role of sexism and colorism in the context of heterosexual love narratives. I use autoethnography, references to popular culture, and interdisciplinary scholarship to discuss my personal journey of identity, identification, and transformation as an unmarried dark-skinned woman.

Joanna Miles, The Devil’s Mortal Weapons: An Anthology of Late Medieval and Protestant Vernacular Theology and Popular Culture. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018, xv, 400 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 500-502
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Middle Ages

As recent scholarship has increasingly realized, all our traditional paradigms regarding historical or cultural epochs are the results of long academic debates and represent the outcome of extensive negotiations. What we have traditionally identified as the Middle Ages and as the Renaissance or the era of the Protestant Reformation, suddenly no longer seems to be so neatly separated. In fact, much of the public discourse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially with respect to religious issues, morality, and ethics, continued well beyond 1500 and even extended into the seventeenth century, as mirrored, for instance, by Shakespeare, who certainly reveals many medieval elements in his writings.

Restoration Celebrity Culture: Twenty-First-Century Regenderings and Rewritings of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, and his Mistress “Pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-143
Author(s):  
Laura Martínez-García
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Good People ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Social Climbing

AbstractCharles II was a figure of controversy during his reign and continues to be one of the most iconic and well-known British monarchs; the portrayals of this King vary significantly from one author to the other and from one period to the next, but they invariably focus on his penchant for frivolity and his sexual liaisons. One of his favourite royal mistresses is Nell Gwyn, the oyster girl, turned orange seller, turned actress, turned mother of Dukes. The figure of ‘pretty, witty’ Nelly has fascinated biographers, filmmakers and novelists for centuries due to its Cinderella-like undertones and the natural fascination that the first female performers have exerted on the public imagination. This paper studies modern rewritings of Charles’s and Nell’s affair and of the two lovers themselves, to trace the attitudes towards the King’s illicit affair and towards the actress’s social climbing. The aim of this paper is to question the motivations for these re-imaginings and to help discover the reasons why the monarch and his “Protestant Whore”The name comes, legend has it, from Nell Gwyn herself and is an anecdote that has been recounted innumerable times. Granger explains that “the story [...] is a known fact; as is also that of her being insulted in her coach at Oxford, by the mob, who mistook her for the duchess of Portsmouth. Upon which she looked out of the window, and said, with her usual good humour, Pray, good people, be civil: I am the protestant whore. This laconic speech drew upon her the blessings of the populace, who suffered her to proceed without further molestation” (Granger 2010: 429). have become the focus of such varied re-writings and two of the most prominent characters of the British public imagination, surpassing the boundaries of their professions, to become part of popular culture.

Community of goods: an unacceptable radical theme at the time of the English revolution

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Cavaillé
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
English History ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Public Sphere

Jean-Pierre Cavaillé discusses the ‛community of goods’ motif permeating Digger and Ranter writings, a theme he studies from an axiological perspective which draws upon the notions of acceptability and unacceptability. His contention is that this theme had been circulating in England and throughout Europe for a long time before the mid-seventeenth century. While borrowing from Christopher Hill’s analysis of seventeenth-century radical plebeians the idea that the ‛community of goods’ theme is rooted in English history, he acknowledges that this motif owes as much to literary culture as to popular culture and argues that the context in which it developed should not be overlooked. According to Cavaillé, the fact that community of goods as a political motif was publicised through print in the late 1640s and early 1650s reflected the attempt of hitherto marginal radical voices to enter the public sphere.

Public Service Motivation in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Mastracci
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Service Motivation ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
Buffy The Vampire Slayer ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

In this paper, the author examines public service as depicted in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS). First, she shows how slaying meets the economist’s definition of a public good, using the BtVS episode “Flooded” (6.04). Second, she discusses public service motivation (PSM) to determine whether or not Buffy, a public servant, operates from a public service ethic. Relying on established measures and evidence from shooting scripts and episode transcripts, the author concludes Buffy is a public servant motivated by a public service ethic. In this way, BtVS informs scholarship on public service by broadening the concept of PSM beyond the public sector; prompting one to wonder whether it is located in a sector, an occupation, or in the individual. These conclusions allow the author to situate Buffy alongside other idealized public servants in American popular culture.

Are They Ready for Their Close-Up? Civil Servants and Their Portrayal in Contemporary American Cinema

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle C. Pautz ◽  
Laura Roselle
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Narrative Forms

Perceptions of government and civil servants are shaped by a variety of factors including popular culture. In the public administration literature the significant role that film and other narrative forms have on citizens’ perceptions is duly noted, and there is ample research on politicians and military heroes in film, but a focus on civil servants remains largely elusive. Among the sparse literature centered on civil servants are studies that employ a case study approach or focus on a few films. In contrast, our research employs a large sample of 150 films. These films comprise the top ten box-office grossing films from 1992 through 2006; therefore we examine the films most likely to have been seen by a majority of movie-watching Americans. More than 60 percent of the films in our sample portray government as bad, inefficient, and incompetent. However, the data on more than 300 civil servants yield intriguing findings. Surprising, in light of the negative depiction of government, is the positive depiction of individual civil servants. Half of civil servants were positively portrayed, and only 40 percent were negatively depicted. Americans may view government negatively, but they see in film positive depictions of how individual civil servants can and do make a positive difference.

Living machines in our cultural imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Public perceptions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)—both positive and negative—are hopelessly misinformed, based far too much on science fiction rather than science fact. However, these fictions can be instructive, and reveal to us important anxieties that exist in the public imagination, both towards robots and AI and about the human condition more generally. These anxieties are based on little-understood processes (such as anthropomorphization and projection), but cannot be dismissed merely as inaccuracies in need of correction. Our demonization of robots and AI illustrate two-hundred-year-old fears about the consequences of the Enlightenment and industrialization. Idealistic hopes projected onto robots and AI, in contrast, reveal other anxieties, about our mortality—and the transhumanist desire to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies—and about the future of our species. This chapter reviews these issues and considers some of their broader implications for our future lives with living machines.

Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Augmentation ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter introduces the “Perspectives” section of the Handbook of Living Machines offering an overview of the different contributions gathered here that consider how biomimetic and biohybrid systems will transform our personal lives and social organizations, and how we might respond to the challenges that these transformations will inevitably pose to our ‘posthuman’ worlds. The authors in this section see it as essential that those who aspire to create living machines engage with the public to confront misconceptions, deep anxieties, and unrealistic aspirations that presently dominate the cultural imagination, and to include potential users in questions of design and utility as new technologies are being developed. Human augmentation and enhancement are other important themes addressed, raising important questions about what it means fundamentally to be ‘human’. These questions and challenges are addressed through the lens of the social and personal impacts of new technologies on human selves, the public imagination, ethics, and human relationships.

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