Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Alcoholism – Poetry"

This paper critically examines the cultural shifts the confessional poets mainly Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath brought in post war American poetry. Under the rubric of postwar isolation ongoing developmental practices induced by Fordist culture whatever psychic disturbances the contemporary generations encountered, are reflected in Lowell and Plath’s poetry. Unlike St. Augustine’s sacramental confession, confessional poetry primarily aims at autobiographical self-exploration in essence. Yet, the confessional poetry departs from the life writing with its sharp delving into the poet’s life. The kernel point of this paper is to discuss the way the poets debunk the boundary between private and public domain and the way they prefer to write on socially stigmatized issues like alcoholism, mental illness, adultery, suicidal thought, and depression. By exploring these issues, I argue that confessional poetry penetrates into the poetics of politics under postmodernism which blurs the border line of raw and cooked, decent and profane matters. While examining the selected poems of Lowell and Plath, the cathartic motto of the poets has been highly focused when they express their troubled experiences which were indecent in the past.

Aagha Hashar Kashmiri is a renowned poet and dramatist. He is considered one of the pioneers of Modern Urdu theater and his work is known for his poetic language in his dramas. He also wrote many poems i.e. "Shukariya Europe", Moj-e-Zam Zam, Eid Mubarak, Sultan tipu and so on. His poetry has Romanism, socialism, alcoholism, sarcasm, humour and vulgarity. Romanticism was inherent in his poetry and beauty was part of his nature. That is why his poetry is full of romanticism. The essence of speech is prominent in his poems and songs. Imagination, figure carving, subtle elegance, informality, creativity, similes and metaphors are the distinguish characteristics of his Ghazals. He also uses vulgar and immortal words in his poetry but his poetry contains hope and philosophy of life. Aagha Hashar had a lasting impact on Urdu.

Märta Tikkanen’s poetry collection Århundradets kärlekssaga ( The love story of the century, 1978) is a confessional book on life in a family where the husband and father is an alcohol abuser. It is also a love story about a married couple who love one another despite the terrible challenges posed to the relationship by alcoholism. The poetry collection became one of the most influential books in contemporary Nordic fiction, its themes on gender roles and alcohol abuse setting the trend in the Nordic discussion of women’s liberation. Märta Tikkanen’s courage to tell her own private story inspired other women to confess their gender equality problems to the public. The alcohol abuse of Märta Tikkanen’s husband Henrik Tikkanen was seen as an allegory for the more general problems in the relation between men and women. My essay introduces Märta Tikkanen’s poetry collection and discusses how the poems develop the theme of gender and alcohol. I will also compare her description of their marriage with Henrik Tikkanen’s self-portrait in his autobiographical novella Mariegatan 26, Kronohagen (1977). The analysis refers to contemporary research on gender and alcohol abuse and discusses how the poems contribute to a public recognition of the relationship between gender and alcohol abuse. The essay discusses the reception of Märta Tikkanen’s influential poems and explores her treatment of alcohol and gender in relation to other Nordic confessional or fictional books on alcohol abuse.

Every journal has its own character. This is a reflection of the editor's interests and concerns, his conception of what the journal is there to do. He selects out of all the papers offered by contributors those which by subject-matter fit the journal's points of view. A journal may be called Clinical Psychiatry and will then obviously not publish papers on the chemistry of helium or the early poetry of T. S. Eliot, but what about human brain physiology or animal psychology? Observations on homosexuality in dogs, perhaps, but not experimental alcoholism in rats? Behavioural problems in people with diabetes, treatment of the epilepsies, fear of flying, depiction of suicide in opera? Where will the editor be tempted to extend the boundary of acceptance?

Upon his return from Berlin in 1939, Jaime Saenz started working in La Paz for intelligence agencies and public relations offices of Bolivia and the United States, which led to correspondent positions with Reuters and McGraw-Hill World News. His trajectory into Cold War Bolivian state nobility seemed all but guaranteed. However, on the brink of this breakout moment, he renounced his job —and professionalism altogether— committing himself to a life of literature and alcoholism as his marriage unraveled. In response to repeated interventions, he justified his every loss with a further indictment of the precautious, which was an outgrowth of his belief in the existence of a higher truth that was both accessible and impervious to analytical reason. In this article, I ask how Saenz’s poetry from the 1950s metabolized the rhetoric of indictment which it had inherited from the Tellurism of the Chaco generation. How might Muerte por el tacto (1957) be symptomatic of a broader aim of restoring to modern poetry its oracular legitimacy? On what grounds did Saenz indict precautious defenders of historical culture? And how did such an indictment mediate “national energy” (Tamayo) as it came into language through the nativist discourse of the land? Paying focal attention to regimes of revelation in Saenz’s early poetry and the historical conditions of its production, this article updates a discussion among Transatlanticists about the legitimization of irrationalism in 20th-century poetics and politics by assessing the socio-symbolic value of the oracular in the regionalist discourse of modernism.

Alfred Lord Tennyson was the most loved and acclaimed poet of the Victorian Era. He was born on 06 August 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. He belonged to an influential family as his father was a clergyman having a large family. Alfred Lord Tennyson had 11 siblings and he showed his interest for writing in his early age. When he was merely thirteen years old, he wrote a 6000-line poem in epic style. His father was suffering from mental breakdowns and had an addiction for alcoholism. One of Tennyson’s brothers would quarrel with his father and another was sent to mental asylum. One more brother had opium addiction like T.S. Eliot. Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1827 and he wrote Poems by Two Brothers in collaboration with his brother there. Tennyson had close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam and both of them went to Europe tour in 1830 and 1832. Tennyson wrote an elegy In memoriam on Hallam’s death. He dedicated some of his poem to Hallam. He published Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830 and then Poems in 1832. People criticized these books and consequently he did not write for nine years. He got emotionally attached with Emily Sellwood. He rose to fame in 1942 and when his elegy published in 1850, he became the most popular poet of England. He became the Poet Laureate of England after the death of William Wordsworth and when Samuel Rogers refused this offer. He got married with Emily Sellwood. He died on October 6, 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Present paper is an attempt to analyse Tennyson’s selected poems from multiple angles.

Abstract: It is impossible to read much about American poet Anne Sexton before encountering references to her "perverse" imagination. Critics routinely argue that she paints a perverse vision of childhood sexuality, female identity, and adult sexuality in her work, and they often object to her frank discussions of the body, its pleasures, and its dangerous powers. Her depictions of mental illness, initiated in To Bedlam and Part Way Back , also earned the derision of many critics who urged her "not to enquire further." Helen Vendler (1988) argued that "a poem was never better for having a uterus in it," and James Dickey objected to being exposed to so much "naked suffering"; that quote was in Anne's wallet when she killed herself in her garage in 1974. In her interviews and her poetry, Sexton answered these critics as a confessional poet and a cultural critic. But even after her death, accusations of her perversion abound. First, her biographer, Diane Middlebrook, exposed her sexual abuse of her daughter Linda. And then Sexton's sister Blanche referred to the poet's "perverse imagination" in a 1991 letter to the Boston Globe , where she and her daughters objected to how Middlebrook's biography represented Sexton's family as riddled with alcoholism, child neglect and/or abuse, and suicide.

The article analyzes the worldview system of Danylo Bratkowski, presented in his Polish-language poetry. Two vectors of her development in the multicultural space of the border area are indicated - as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations and a son of the Ukrainian people, who at that time formed the baroque culture of this state on an equal footing with other peoples, but at the same time defended her own national values. It has been proven that the poet embodied the principles of civilizational proteism, which, according to David Szymchak’s definition, had a moderate character. This was manifested in the image of the Sarmatian hero, who skillfully combined common state values with his own national and religious beliefs in the intercultural space of the borderland. The artist’s «piety» manifested itself not only in religious matters, but also in the moral and social code that he professed. Most of the poems in the collection «The World Considered in Parts» are dedicated to this very topic, framed by baroque conceptualism. The problems of women’s fate, youth and old age, freedom of national expression, moral transgressions in society, political equality, etc., require more detailed consideration. One of the key moral transgressions among representatives of different nationalities was alcoholism. Many poems by Danylo Bratkovskyi are devoted to this problem. The poet condemned this harmful habit, both male and female, which destroyed the person and his environment. A passion for excessive wealth and foreign fashion, which often put a person in a ridiculous position, had similar negative connotations. Laughter combined with satire became a feature of Bratkovsky’s authorial style. The writer’s fascination with Sarmatian ideas influenced the formation of his lyrical hero. He is presented in the spirit of idealization, devoid of negative features, endowed with special virtues. From a political point of view, this image has a more realistic character, since the Polish and Ukrainian nobility preserved the tradition and attributes of their status, but in their actions and habits they deviated far from this ideal. From the collection it appears that the author idealized himself and portrayed himself as an example to follow. Balancing between political ambitions and universal values, expressed in philosophical and religious dimensions, testify to the high level of education and diplomacy of the poet as a representative of the Ukrainian people, Orthodoxy and a citizen of a multicultural state.

Drunkenness – a “Passion” in Roman Criminal Law?SummarySince ancient times jurists and lawyers have had to handle offencesconnected with alcohol abuse. There are only three texts on drunkenness in the Roman legal sources: two relate to offences committed byinebriate soldiers, and the third contains the basic division into intentional offences, accidental offences, and crimes of passion. In all threecategories drunkenness was a mitigating factor, which may be surprising for modern lawyers. Other Roman sources present public opinionon drinking, which seems to have depended on the circumstances– heavy drinking and alcoholism were disapproved of. A precise analysis of the rhetorical writings shows elaborate distinctions betweenintentional and unintentional acts. Drunkenness was regarded as anemotional state which could influence the penalty, but the specific circumstances of the offence were crucial. The rhetorical works confirmthe views presented in poetry and philosophy. Contrary to the legalsources, the facts seem to show that a judge could sentence an offenderto a severe or mild punishment, or even acquit him if drunkenness hadbeen a factor contributing to the offence. The rhetorical works may beconsidered to provide not only an important theoretical background tothe legal sources, but also crucial supplementary information givinga better insight into Roman criminal law.

Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, both prominent Canadian poets, spent together over four decades as partners and later as a married couple. While original and unique in their respective visions and concepts they present in their poetry, both often focus on the deep links between human and non-human, people and the world of animate and inanimate nature. This focus is also prominent in their memoirs: Lane’s There Is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden (2004; published in the US as What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered), and Crozier’s Through the Garden: A Love Story (With Cats) (2020). This article focuses specifically on the literal and metaphoric meanings and roles of gardens and cats in the process of coming to terms with loss (in particular death) and change as described in the two memoirs. The former is Lane’s meditation on the process of recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, which is accompanied by a reflection on his past, in particular his relationship with his mother—all told in the context of his work on developing his garden. One of his poignant conclusions is “What we are is a garden”, picked up by Crozier in Through the Garden, which explores the last two years of Lane’s life, marked by grave illness, and the story of their relationship—a life lived with cats.

The purpose of this paper is to find literary motifs that South Korean and North Korean literature can handle together even under different political systems. Previous studies have generally tended to focus on examining how the literature of present-day South Korea differs from that of North Korea when identifying certain aspects of North Korean socialist literature. The goal of this paper is to find out what literary motifs the literature of North and South Korea can nevertheless share. To this end, we looked into which materials most honestly reveal the instinctive side of humans as research subjects. It is considered to be none other than the alcohol and drinking culture that the South and the North have side by side. In other words, it is believed that Korean alcohol and its culture, which originated from myth, will be an excellent material that both South and North Korea can empathize with as human beings even today, without any special interpretation, and can be reinterpreted in a modern way. Accordingly, among the literary works published in North Korea from 1948 to the early 2000s, medium and short stories and poetry were the focus of the study. This period was a period in which division was solidified on the Korean Peninsula for nearly 70 years. According to the research method, the period was divided into four sections: liberation and the establishment of North Korea's independent government, the Korean War and post-war recovery, the Chollima Movement, and the Juche ideology and Juche period. This is because North Korean literature is inseparable from the transformation of the political system. In conclusion, we analyzed North Korea's political system and reality through the socialist constitution that North Korea advocates, and explained how the element of alcohol appears in North Korean literature as a factor that prevents us from losing humanity and humanity, which literature generally pursues. Next, the symbolic nature of alcohol was identified as a common literary motif that can be shared between South and North Korea.

The Prose (and Cons) of Vodka Drawing extensively on his own first-hand experience as someone who came of age during the prolonged “stagnation” of the Brezhnev years, and then witnessed the upheavals of perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and the wild-West capitalism of the 1990s under Yeltsin, the writer and journalist Dmitrii Stakhov explores the changing fortunes of vodka, Russia’s “alcoholic drink No. 1,” and its enduring significance as a symbol, “cultural yardstick,” and economic unit of exchange over the last quarter of a century in this hard-drinking and hard-pressed nation. Stakhov’s essay details Russians’ long love affair with vodka, as well their sometimes dangerous dalliances with various vodka substitutes (often of unknown or highly dubious origin) and their more recent infatuation, in a new era of seemingly unlimited consumer choice, with other, more manifestly “Western” alcoholic drinks (whiskey, beer, wine). Stakhov suggests that the recent shifts in drinking habits in Russia (with Russians developing more discriminating and highbrow tastes) has in certain important ways entailed a loss of cultural values and a diminished sense of community and camaraderie. No one looks after the local drunk any more, and no one is interested any longer in going in on the proverbial “threesome” of Soviet times (a bottle of vodka split three ways): now it is a Darwinian world of “every man for himself.” For better or worse the old poetry and mythos of vodka, Stakhov concludes, has died, replaced instead by the harsher (and less interesting) prose of the free market.

The following article provides information on the manuscripts of Amir Khusrow Dehlavi’s heritage, especially the manuscripts stored at the Institute of Oriental Studies named after Abu Rayhan Biruni under Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and their research on rubai's. The manuscript that we have reviewed shows the origin of the ghazals. However, no mention is made of where ruba’is came from. The order of giving of the ruba’is is not based on any principle in many manuscripts. It can be seen that only a few of them are in alphabetical order, either by the first letter of ruba’i, or by the last letter of the rhyme. It is worth noting that the mixed circulation of the ruba’is of the five devans in the manuscript may be attributed to the long-standing tendency of the poet's devotees to try to fit into one collection

Tom Waits, through his poetry, his poetic and public personae, has become the father of the desperate failures of society, those who lay down and fill the background with disillusionment. No-direction-homers flock together and become the majority of Waits’ main characters. As an artist, he gives a voice and a name to those who, otherwise, would remain invisible, endowing them with corporeality. Waits, through the projection of his public persona, illumines the lives of the weak, who strive to survive in a world that has always fed upon those below. There is something honourable about the people who struggle the most, trying to find their path in the darkest of places, and Waits, through his career as an entertainer, has always prioritised his respect for these people, praising their many faults and poor decisions, merging them with the tormented collective and thus becoming one with their sadness and horror. This paper will focus on how Tom Waits constructs his personae through an identification with the disappointments of society: the underdog, and, more particularly, the alcoholic underdog. I intend to focus mainly on the lyrical content of his albums Rain Dogs and Small Change, together with their respective representations in other art forms, specifically interviews, lives, artistry, etc. This section will also include Tom Waits’ depiction of some characters as grotesques, as they form the limits of societal acceptance. In the last section, I will examine the presence and construction of these grotesques in his album Alice (2002), while comparing the lyrical content to its other cultural manifestations.

"Women of Algiers" Via Eugene Delacroix’s Palette and “La Grande Maison” of Mohamed Dib ABSTRACT: Our "choice" of "Women of Algiers in their apartment" by Eugène Delacroix and "La Grande Maison" by Mohamed Dib will be a work of "paragon", a comparative analysis. Via ut-pictura poesis and ut-poesis pictura, we will try to establish the confrontation between writing and painting in order to detect the dichotomy of the imago of the Algerian woman in the imagination of each of the two artists. At first, we will study the subjectivity of the painter who gives us a stereotypical and even shocking portrait of the Algerian woman. In a second step, we probe the portrait of the Algerian woman through the character of "Aîni" who represents an insistent, cruel and unbearable painting of suffering. Tortured by the evil of colonization, she finds herself consumed by an obsessive mourning: the burden of a family that can never eat enough and the bad memories of an alcoholic husband. Between the retreat, the calm, the secrets of the Harem of the "Women of Algiers in their apartment" and the continual movement, the cries, the sobs of the woman in the work of Mohamed Dib, there are two worlds which arise and oppose each other, which deepen without intersecting. Thirdly, we will insist on the poetics of the pictorial and the strength of hypotyposis in the readable. In fact, the two masterpieces achieve, through the portrait, the aesthetic ideal: “to paint the sensation”. We will take as a touchstone the mechanisms of the portrait through the text as “talking painting” and through painting as “silent poetry”. As for the approaches that mark out our research, we propose the semiology of the image, thematic criticism, the relationship between narration and description in the elaboration of the portrait and therefore the importance of hypotyposis. We will not lose sight of socio-criticism as well as psycho-criticism. RÉSUMÉ: Notre « choix » de « Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement » d’Eugène Delacroix et de la trilogie de Mohamed Dib sera un travail de « paragon », une analyse comparative. Via l’ut-pictura poesis et l’ut-poesis pictura, nous essaierons d’établir la confrontation entre écriture et peinture afin de déceler la dichotomie de l’imago de la femme algérienne dans l’imaginaire de chacun des deux artistes. Dans un premier temps, nous étudierons la subjectivité du peintre qui nous donne un portrait stéréotypé voire choquant de la femme algérienne. Dans un deuxième temps, nous sondons le portrait de la femme algérienne à travers le personnage de « Aïni » qui représente une peinture insistante, cruelle et insoutenable de la souffrance. Torturée par le mal de la colonisation, elle se trouve consumée par un deuil obsédant : la charge d’une famille qui ne peut jamais manger à sa faim et les mauvais souvenirs d’un époux alcoolique. Entre la retraite, le calme, les secrets du Harem des Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement et le mouvement continuel, les cris, les sanglots de la femme dans la trilogie de Mohamed Dib, il ya deux mondes qui se posent et s’opposent, qui se creusent sans s’entrecroiser. Dans un troisième temps, nous insisterons sur la poétique du pictural et la force de l’hypotypose dans le lisible. En fait, les deux chefs-d’oeuvre. réussissent, à travers le portrait, l’idéal esthétique : « peindre la sensation » (Deleuze 1994, 28) Nous prendrons pour pierre de touche les mécanismes du portrait à travers le texte comme « une peinture parlante » et à travers la peinture comme une « poésie muette » Quant aux approches qui balisent notre recherche, nous proposons la sémiologie de l’image, la critique thématique, la relation entre narration et description dans l’élaboration du portrait et par là l’importance de l’hypotypose. Nous ne perdrons pas de vue la sociocritique ainsi que la psychocritique

A campaign to outspread the use of alcohol was considered by colonial rulers as a way of enrichment, and they strove to popularise it in every possible manner. This approach resulted in an increased demand for alcohol from workers, while the profit from these ventures enriched a sector of the indigenous population. ‘Fleecing the last penny’ seemed to be the foundation, on which the colonials based their economic policy. As was traditional amongst the colonial elite, alcohol and beer were served at celebratory functions. Some groups in the society and social workers opposed to the increased use of alcohol amongst the population and objected via public protests, but the government considered this as a source of increased revenue. Popularising alcohol would steadily lead to disastrous social consequences. Aim of the present study is to find whether a directlink prevailed between heavy drinking and violence. To realize this objective, this research study utilisedprimary and secondary sources from original booklets written on the subject obtained from Sri Lankan Museum Library, National Archives in Sri Lanka, and London British library. Data analysis and other collected information revealed a direct link between the increased use of alcohol and violence, which led to a radical change in the society.Key words: Alcohol, Violence, Printing, Poet

This article examines the early nineteenth century connections between human, animal and plant by placing Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) in conversation with Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). I argue that the Romantic versions of heredity described in Darwin’s poetry tended to reinscribe traditional gender roles. Brontë’s Tenant, on the other hand, revises earlier notions of heredity and motherhood via Helen Huntingdon, the wife of an alcoholic who tries to prevent her son from activating his genetic taint. By reconfiguring the supposedly natural connections between patriarchal inheritance of the land on the one hand and biological traits on the other, and by reclaiming and reinscribing popular metaphors of breeding, Anne Brontë’s female protagonist creates and attempts to implement a maternalist version of heredity while remaining entrenched within the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood. Whereas the Romantic and romanticized poetry of Erasmus Darwin and his contemporaries’ approach to natural history bestowed human characteristics on plants in order to make their reproduction more comprehensible, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does the opposite. Without a satisfactory framework in place to express the anxieties surrounding human heredity, Brontë turns the tables on the metaphor and applies the language of breeding and agriculture to a human child. In doing so, she creates an alternate version of heredity based on maternal strength and power rather than one predicated upon patriarchal structures of kinship and economic inheritance.

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." 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