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Books on the topic 'Mainstream fiction'
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1
Pearl, Nancy. Now read this III: A guide to mainstream fiction. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.
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2
Martha, Knappe, and Higashi Chris, eds. Now read this: A guide to mainstream fiction, 1978-1998. Englewood, Colo: Libraries Unlimited, 1999.
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3
The span of mainstream and science fiction: A critical study of a new literary genre. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co., 2002.
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4
From margins to mainstream: Feminism and fictional modes in Italian women's writing, 1968-1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
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5
Batory, Edward A. The Fanner: Mainstream Fiction About Old West. Writers Club Press, 2002.
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6
Hooligan (Mainstream Sport). Mainstream Publishing, 1998.
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7
Scott, Nova. Missouri in a Suitcase. Cork Hill Press, 2003.
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8
Larson, Ann E., and Carole A. Carr. Crossing the Mainstream: New Fiction by Women Writers. Silverleaf Pr, 1987.
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9
E, Larson Ann, and Carr Carole A. 1945-, eds. Crossing the mainstream: New fiction by women writers. Seattle, Wash: Silverleaf Press, 1987.
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10
Now Read This II: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1990-2001. Libraries Unlimited, 2002.
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11
Now Read This II: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1990-2001. Libraries Unlimited 2002, 2002.
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12
Schellenberg, Betty A., and Karen O’Brien. Bluestocking Women and Rational Female Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199574803.003.0008.
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This chapter examines views on the emerging novel developed by a loose network of mid-eighteenth-century women who came to be known as the Bluestocking circle, and the legacy of these views for succeeding women novelists. It will look at how Frances Burney's four fictional works can be seen as furthering, while revising, this legacy within an increasingly mainstream novel tradition, but also at how ongoing resistance to this generic mainstream resulted in consistently ‘Bluestocking’ forms of rational fiction in a primarily Scottish Enlightenment context. The brief overview of Burney's rational fictions focuses on a seeming paradox in her version of the rational novel—her tendency to subject her heroines to a bout of madness.
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McClung, Michael. Music With Dancing. Xlibris Corporation, 2003.
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14
1930-, Della Corte Carlo, and Pestriniero Renato 1933-, eds. Cronache dell'arcipelago: La fantascienza tra genere e "mainstream" dalla laguna al cosmo. Venezia: Il Cardo, 1996.
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15
The Crowded World of Solitude: The Collected Stories And Essays. Xlibris Corporation, 2005.
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The Crowded World of Solitude. Xlibris Corporation, 2005.
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Russo, Albert. The Crowded World of Solitude: The Collected Stories And Essays. Xlibris Corporation, 2005.
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Russo, Albert. The Crowded World of Solitude. Xlibris Corporation, 2005.
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19
1933-, White Kenton S., ed. How to publish your short and long fiction: A directory to 1,000 markets, mainstream, traditional, modern, for beginners and advanced writers. Northridge, CA: North Hills Publishers, 1996.
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20
Roald, Dahl. Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (Mainstream Series): A selection of classic chillers, chosen by the master of macabre. Isis Large Print Books, 1987.
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21
Whitehead, Anne. Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748686186.001.0001.
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This book offers a critique of the dominant understanding and deployment of empathy in the mainstream medical humanities. Drawing on feminist theory, it positions empathy not as something that one has or lacks, and needs to accrue, but as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional and cultural relations of power. It aims to provide a critically informed definition of empathy, drawing on phenomenology, in order to counter the vagueness of the term as it has often been used. It questions, too, the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, looking to a broader and more encompassing definition of the ‘medical’. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Pat Barker’s Life Class, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this book contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another’s illness experience, but itself engages critically with the question of empathy and its limits. The volume marks a key contribution to the rapidly evolving field of the critical medical humanities.
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Kinane, Ian, ed. Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620047.001.0001.
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Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterised most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.
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Song, Mingwei. Representations of the Invisible. Edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199383313.013.28.
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The marginalized genre of science fiction has experienced an unprecedented boom in China in recent years, a “new wave” of writing that reinvents the genre by infusing it with a new literary self-consciousness and a new social awareness and by representing the complex realities and fantasies of a changing China and a changing world. The discussion of Chinese science fiction in this chapter, with a focus on works by Han Song and Liu Cixin, centers on the representation of the invisible: science fiction as an invisible genre, the new wave’s representation of the “invisible” reality of China, and tropes of invisibility in the texts themselves. By working with and through invisibility, these texts transgress mainstream literary realism and official political discourse. The chapter ends with a coda featuring a brief discussion of the invisible “posthumans” among China’s migrant workers as featured in Chen Qiufan’s novelThe Waste Tide.
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Hargreaves, Ian. 4. Star-struck: journalism as entertainment. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199686872.003.0005.
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Journalism has always entertained as well as informed, but has the recent instinct to amuse driven out the will, and depleted the resource, for serious reporting and analysis? ‘Star-struck: journalism as entertainment’ analyses tabloid reporting, the rise of reality TV, the entertainment and sales potential of celebrity reporting, and the recent blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction in journalist reporting. Good tabloid journalism can, and does, widen access to politics and other serious subjects, but it’s not funny when high-profile mainstream journalism becomes infected with an easy-going relationship with facts.
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Grenby, M. O. Children’s and Juvenile Literature. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199574803.003.0027.
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This chapter examines children's and juvenile literature. Many pre-Victorian children did not encounter children's fiction at all. A substantial number, of course, were largely disconnected from literary culture by indigence or illiteracy. However, lots of those young people who did consume books continued to use material designed primarily for adults. What confuses the matter is that the distinction could be very blurred between literature for adults and literature for ‘young gentlemen and ladies’. What would now be called ‘crossover’ works were common: titles originally aimed at adults that were quickly appropriated by or for young readers. By 1820, the novel for children was establishing itself as a distinct entity, but had not quite disconnected itself from the mainstream. Children's fiction was still shadowing the novel for adults, imitating its genres, and sharing its concerns.
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Eller, Jonathan R. The Anthology Game. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036293.003.0032.
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This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's failed attempt to publish a mainstream literary anthology of science fiction stories centered on Mars. The development of the Illinois novel was slowed by Bradbury's increased focus on the science fiction stories he was writing and revising with more and more frequency. Despite Don Congdon's influence with a wide range of editors, these stories were still not selling to the major magazines at all. What sustained both his spirit and his reputation during this period was his almost phenomenal success with the premier award anthologies of the day such as the Best American Short Stories annual and the O. Henry Prize Stories. This chapter considers the impact of Bradbury's anthology awards on his writing life by focusing on his membership in the leftist poetry magazine California Quarterly, founded by Dolph Sharp and others. It also discusses Bradbury's idea for an anthology that would consist of twenty-five science fiction stories, a project that he called “The Martian Chronicles. Edited by Ray Bradbury” and never came to fruition.
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Eller, Jonathan R. A New World of Reading. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036293.003.0013.
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This chapter examines how Ray Bradbury extended his reading of mainstream modern and contemporary British and American writers in all genres during the final years of World War II and beyond. Bradbury's road to all his mature fiction was paved to a large extent by a great wartime shift in his personal reading agenda. The most surprising transition in his reading is his sudden and permanent shift away from reading new science fiction sometime in 1944. This chapter discusses Bradbury's broadening reading and maturing tastes in literature by looking at some of the stories he read, from Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas and The Leaning Tower to Thomas Wolfe's The Face of the Nation, Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories of 1944, Cornell Woolrich's Rendezvous in Black, and A Touch of Nutmeg and More Unlikely Stories by John Collier.
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Rogers, Holly, and Jeremy Barham, eds. The Music and Sound of Experimental Film. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.001.0001.
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This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.
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Shippey, Tom. Hard Reading. Liverpool University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781382615.001.0001.
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This book makes an argument for the intellectual ambition and intellectual achievement of science fiction, a genre consistently undervalued by professional literary critics. It is pointed out repeatedly how much the genre owes to developments in anthropology, history, and other “soft sciences”; how the authority of the hard sciences is both asserted and challenged; and how the authority of ancient myths and modern values are likewise interrogated, with widely variant results. Science fiction, it is argued, has been a collective “thinking machine” for authors and readers alike, often (and especially in its early years) people without academic experience or intellectual support. It has been (but increasingly less so) a genre for autodidacts. Reading and writing it is nevertheless an education in itself, as the author shows with repeated personal prefaces both to the book as a whole and to each chapter. Science fiction, finally, has its own rhetoric, seen in neologisms, paratextual devices, anachronisms, breaches of stylistic decorum, and the manipulation of degraded information, techniques little understood by and often incomprehensible to critics used only to the conventions of mainstream literature. All these features contribute to the description of science fiction as hard reading, but correspondingly rewarding reading. They have made science fiction the most characteristic literary genre of the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries.
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D'hoker, Elke, and Chris Mourant, eds. The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461085.001.0001.
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This collection of original essays highlights the intertwined fates of the modern short story and periodical culture in the period 1880–1950, the heyday of magazine short fiction in Britain. Through case studies that focus on particular magazines, short stories and authors, chapters investigate the presence, status and functioning of short stories within a variety of periodical publications – highbrow and popular, mainstream and specialised, middlebrow and avant-garde. Examining the impact of social and publishing networks on the production, dissemination and reception of short stories, this essay collection foregrounds the ways in which magazines and periodicals shaped conversations about the short story form and prompted or provoked writers into developing the genre.
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Smith, Jad. Interview with John Brunner. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037337.003.0006.
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This chapter presents the transcript of an interview with John Brunner conducted by Steven L. Goldstein. The interview covered topics such as where Brunner gets his ideas; how he goes about putting his ideas on paper; whether he believes that the future will be as bleak as he made it appear in The Sheep Look Up; whether he follows a set, daily pattern in his work; if he knew that his experimental novels such as Stand on Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit would turn out the way they did; advice that he can give to aspiring writers; his views on the influence of mainstream writers on science fiction; and how he felt when he won the Hugo Award for Stand on Zanzibar.
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Mitchell, Koritha. Redefining “Black Theater”. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036491.003.0003.
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This chapter demonstrates that the first black-authored lynching play, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké, emerged in 1914 partly because the mainstream stage accepted black actors but limited them to comedy or white-authored material. Grimké and others thus began privileging playwriting over acting in order to control the race's representation. Nevertheless, African American intellectuals and artists came to value black dramatists because of the success of performers—even minstrels and musical comedians. Moreover, Grimké's Rachel proved influential enough to initiate the genre of lynching drama because other poets and fiction writers also began writing plays. As Grimké's successors offered generic revisions, their efforts helped to redefine black theater again. The chapter therefore identifies the differences and commonalities between their work and Grimké's.
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Eller, Jonathan R. The Miracle Year: Summer and Fall. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036293.003.0036.
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This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's phenomenal year as a writer during the summer and fall of 1950. A chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood at a Los Angeles bookstore in early July 1950 provided the critical breakthrough that Bradbury needed to bring The Martian Chronicles more fully into mainstream literary appreciation. The timing of Bradbury's review copy gift could not have been better; Isherwood had just agreed to write extended book reviews for Tomorrow, a new literary magazine. Isherwood's review of the Chronicles appeared in the October 1950 issue of Tomorrow. This chapter first considers the impact of Isherwood's friendship on Bradbury's career before turning to Bradbury's new “Illustrated Man” concept for Doubleday and his creation of a 100-page typescript titled Long after Midnight. It also discusses Bradbury's deal with Bantam for an anthology of new fantasy and science fiction stories.
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Marks, Peter. Literature of the 1990s. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411592.001.0001.
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Placing literary creativity within a changing cultural and political context that saw the end of Margaret Thatcher and rise of New Labour, this book offers fresh interpretations of mainstream and marginal works from all parts of Britain. Based on a framework of thematically-structured accounts, the individual chapters cover national identity, ethnicity, sexuality, class, celebrity culture, history and fantasy in literature from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. It offers its readers a comprehensive view of the changing and challenging literary landscape in this period, critically examining the fiction, poetry and drama as well as representative films, art and music. Placed within the broader context of a transformative political and cultural environment that included Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Damian Hirst and Princess Diana, the book captures the energetic and sometimes provocative experimentation that typified the final decade of the twentieth century.
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Eller, Jonathan R. Broadening Horizons. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036293.003.0034.
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This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's professional and personal milestones that followed the crisis of 1949 involving The Illustrated Man. The insights that emerged from Bradbury's April 1949 exchange of letters with Don Congdon renewed the writer's confidence in his submissions. Since then, he worked with Congdon ever more closely to have his Green Town stories, science fiction tales, and fantasies get through the offices of the mainstream magazine editors. By June 1949, Congdon had at least eighteen active story files. This chapter discusses memorable moments in Bradbury's life and career in 1949, including his interaction with UCLA's writing group; his lectures on writing; and his meeting with Theodore Sturgeon and Walter Bradbury. It also considers Bradbury's readings during the period and concludes by noting the transformation of his concept of a Martian story collection into a unified work more in line with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.
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Lecourt, Sebastian. National Supernaturalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812494.003.0006.
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This chapter examines how the late-Victorian folklorist and critic Andrew Lang reinvented the idea of many-sidedness as a populist polemic—one that showed W. B. Yeats how to recuperate the old moves of literary nationalism for a global modernism. Although Lang had been Arnold’s student at Oxford, his seminal anthropological treatises insisted that many-sidedness could best be cultivated not by sampling “the best which has been thought and said in the world” but rather by omnivorously embracing ancient folk tales alongside pop fiction. Yet Lang’s populism was also predicated upon a crypto-Romantic view of folklore as talismans of an endangered authenticity out of place in the modern world. This buried essentialism ultimately alienated Lang from mainstream anthropology, but it would also teach the young Yeats that presenting the national as the primitive and the primitive as the occult allowed one to frame Irish folk literature as simultaneously local and cosmopolitan.
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Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923624.003.0014.
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This book has examined how the American political media ecosystem figures in discourses on national politics in general and on presidential politics in particular. It has shown that the internet has no single effect on democracy, news media, or people’s ability to distinguish truth from fiction. Instead, “the internet” is really an integral part of two very different media ecosystems, one of which conforms to the very worst fears of those critical of the effects of the internet on democracy and the other combines attention paid to professional media still pursuing norm-constrained journalism with diverse outlets for mobilization, challenging agenda setting and questioning the mainstream media narrative. These findings suggest that the very introduction of the internet and social media does not itself put pressure on democracy as such, but they also imply that there is no easy fix for epistemic crisis in countries where a hyperpartisan, propaganda-rich environment exists.
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Eller, Jonathan R. Bantam and Ballantine. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036293.003.0043.
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This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's mass-market paperback anthology Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, published by Bantam, and his contract with Ballantine for three science fiction novellas. Timeless Stories, which reached bookstores in time for the fall 1952 publishing season, was Bradbury's first achievement as a literary editor. Featuring works by twenty-five authors, the anthology reflected a more optimistic aspect of the myths Bradbury was developing to negotiate modernity as a writer. Most of the selections played into a more fundamental Bradbury strategy—his long-standing goal of extending fantasy into the literary mainstream by including “authors who rarely write fantasy.” Bradbury wanted to define fantasy by guarding against the dangers that lurked just beyond its margins. This chapter first considers how Bradbury's editorship of Timeless Stories had forced him to articulate his sense of authorship in a way he had never done before. It then looks at Bradbury's Ballantine book contract for his three novellas.
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Spiers, Emily. Pop-Feminist Narratives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198820871.001.0001.
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Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematization of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this study is the question of theorizing the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany – means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. Pop-Feminist Narratives constitutes the first attempt to provide such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including literary fiction, the popular ‘guide’ to feminism, film, music, and the digital.
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Levinson, Jerrold, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279456.001.0001.
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The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics looks at a fascinating theme in philosophy and the arts. Leading figures in the field contribute forty-eight articles which detail the theory, application, history, and future of philosophy and all branches of the arts. The first article of the book gives a general overview of the field of philosophical aesthetics in two parts: the first is a quick sketch of the lay of the land, and the second an account of five central problems over the past fifty years. The second article gives an extensive survey of recent work in the history of modern aesthetics, or aesthetic thought from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. There are three main parts to the book. The first part comprises sections dealing with problems in aesthetics, such as expression, fiction or aesthetic experience, considered apart from any particular artform. The second part contains articles on problems in aesthetics as they arise in connection with particular artforms, such as music, film, or dance. The third part addresses relations between aesthetics and other fields of enquiry, and explores viewpoints or concerns complimentary to those prominent in mainstream analytical aesthetics.
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Nette, Andrew. Rollerball. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325666.001.0001.
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Rollerball, the Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison's 1975 vision of a future dominated by anonymous corporations and their executive elite, in which all individual effort and aggressive emotions are subsumed into a horrifically violent global sport, remains critically overlooked. What little has been written deals mainly with its place within the renaissance of Anglo-American science-fiction cinema in the 1970s, or focuses on the elaborately shot, still visceral to watch, game sequences, so realistic they briefly gave rise to speculation Rollerball may become an actual sport. Drawing on numerous sources, including little examined documents in the archive of the film's screenwriter William Harrison, this book examines the many dimensions of Rollerball's making and reception: the way it simultaneously exhibits the aesthetics and narrative tropes of mainstream action and art-house cinema; the elaborate and painstaking process of world creation undertaken by Jewison and Harrison; and the cultural forces and debates that influenced them, including the increasing corporate power and growing violence in Western society in late 1960s and early 1970s. The book shows how a film that was derided by many critics for its violence works as a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future that anticipates numerous contemporary concerns, including ‘fake news’ and declining literary and historical memory. The book includes an interview with Jewison on Rollerball's influences, making, and reception.
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Jordan, Julia. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198857280.001.0001.
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In the decades following the immediately post-war period in Britain, a loose grouping of avant-garde writers that included Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin worked against the dominance, as they saw it, of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period, and finds a body of work engaged with, rather than merely antagonistic towards, the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements, it shows how they have significance not just for our understanding of these decades but also for the broader movement of the novel through the century. Oblique Strategies takes some of the things we tend to say about experimental fiction—how it is unreadable, non-linear, elliptical, errant, plotless—and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period’s investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested in the fleeting and the fugitive, in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique; it attempts to conjure the world at an angle, or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts—error, indeterminacy, uncertainty, accident—all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Reading experimental literature in this light, Oblique Strategies finds it eloquent about the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more broadly.
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Kohm, Steven. The paedophile in popular culture. Edited by Teela Sanders. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190213633.013.27.
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This essay examines fictional representations of sex crime, focusing on the construction of the paedophile in contemporary popular culture. Representations of sex crime and criminals in film and television have tended to mirror broader societal and social scientific assumptions about the nature of the crime, the consequences for victims, and appropriate reactions to offending behavior. Moreover, cinematic explorations of child sexual abuse can offer metaphorical sites to critique contemporary understandings of the causes, consequence, and reactions to the behavior. This essay situates the representation of sex crime and criminals within broader historical, cinematic, and criminological developments over the past century. The author argues that fictional representations of the paedophile constitute a type of popular criminology that can enrich and extend the boundaries of mainstream academic discourse and provide a complex understanding of the philosophical, moral, and cultural meanings of sexual offending at particular moments and places in history.
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Cusack, Carole M. Invention in “New New” Religions. Edited by James R. Lewis and Inga Tøllefsen. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466176.013.17.
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This chapter discusses the concept of invention and applies it to the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs). Invention plays a part in all religions and is linked to other conceptual lenses including syncretism and legitimation. Yet invention is more readily detected in contemporary phenomena (so-called “invented,” “hyper-real,” or “fiction-based” religions), which either eschew, or significantly modify, the appeals to authority, antiquity, and divine revelation that traditionally accompany the establishment of a new faith. The religions referred to in this chapter (including Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, and Jediism) are distinctively “new new” religions, appearing from the mid-twentieth century, and gaining momentum in the deregulated spiritual market of the twenty-first century West. Overt religious invention has mainstreamed in the Western society, as popular culture, individualism and consumerism combine to facilitate the cultivation of personal spiritualities, and the investment of ephemeral entertainments with ultimate significance and meaning.
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Bodroghkozy, Aniko. Is This What You Mean by Color TV? University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036682.003.0008.
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This chapter examines how entertainment television addressed color-blind equality through an analysis of NBC's Julia, considered the most significant entertainment show of the civil rights years. Created by writer-director Hal Kanter and starring Diahann Carroll, Julia presented viewers with whites only as supporting characters. However, the image Julia provided could only clash uncomfortably with dominant news imagery of exploding ghettos, Black Panthers and other non-nonviolent militants, as well as the generalized chaos and upheaval characterizing the period. This chapter argues that Julia was a fictional vision of the “black and white together” utopia promised in the networks' March on Washington coverage. It also considers how black and white audiences as well as mainstream press critics all made sense of the show in notably different and, at times, contradictory ways. Finally, it discusses the concerns of black viewers and some white critics about Julia, including its depiction of the black family.