Gotowa bibliografia na temat „City and town life – Oregon – Fiction”

Ling Ma’s Severance () offers an interesting take on urban life after a pandemic and a resultant zombie apocalypse have turned New York City into a ghost town. The dystopian speculative fiction novel intertextually references the literary and media histories of science fiction and horror. Yet, it exceeds their often exclusively White and cis-male focus for a more comprehensive understanding of how the processes of gentrification are gendered and racialized. This contribution argues that Ma’s novel expands the repertoire of storytelling about gentrification through several stylistic and thematic features. For example, the ways that urban experiences are mediated through stories and enmeshed in global capitalist structures of consumerism. Further, the contribution explores the list of gentrification as an essential stylistic feature of urban fiction and the theme of pregnancy and its relevance in the gentrifying city.

Imaginist poet V.G. Shershenevich died and was buried in 1942 in Barnaul. The fact of the death and burial of the capital’s author in a provincial town has become a landmark event for regional self-identification, and initiated a particular thematic line in local history and fiction. For the first time the article reveals the image of V.G. Shershenevich, which was developed in the work of Barnaul writers. The analysis of poetic and prose texts shows how the reconstruction of the last days of the poet’s life fits him into the urban landscape, how the grave becomes a semantically productive element of the locus. The basic motifs that model the image of the writer are associated with the change of poles of the oppositions “center — periphery,” “glory — oblivion,” “friend — alien (foreign),” “genius – mediocrity,” “friendship — enmity” with S.A. Yesenin. Literary portrait of Shershenevich comes from the synthesis of the features of his poetics, aesthetic attitudes, life events and the realities of the city. Altai writers tend to project literary and historical facts related to the imagist onto their own work and destiny. There is a tendency to turn the poet into a genius loci.

Margaret Oliphant 1828–1897 is best remembered today as one of the important prac­titioners the domestic fiction, with her “Chronicles of Carlingford” series considered to be her most enduring achievement. Oliphant’s other interesting group of works are ghost stories and other spiritual tales known as the “Stories of the Seen and Unseen”. A Beleaguered City, a novella first published in 1879, is generally considered to be Oliphant’s most successful supernatural tale. Set in Semur, France, and told by five different narrators, the story focuses on the inhabitants of Semur, who are evicted from their town by the spirits of the dead. This paper aims to demonstrate that Oliphant uses the supernatural not only to cope with her own experiences of bereavement, but that she also engages with contemporary themes: she comments on gender roles, reveals the shortcom­ings of society that places its faith in progress and material wealth, and exposes the limitations of the scientific or the mechanistic worldview which cannot provide an adequate explanation of “the true signification of life”.

Images of cities and villages for which the consequences of the Chornobyl explosion became the most tangible are outlined in Ukrainian artistic discourse with documentary authenticity. These descriptions exacerbate emotionality, the tone of tragedy, and sometimes apocalyptic coloration. The general nominations city, village, as well as the names of specific settlements that have suffered the most from the Chоrnobyl accident, are consistently combined with the negative epithets deserted, sparsely populated, empty, empty, abandoned, dead, neglected, orphaned. Verbalizing the semantics of ‘lack of life’, ‘fading of life’, ‘desolation’, they depict and assess the state of towns and villages after the accident, in particular in connection with the situation of mass evacuation of residents. The expressiveness of the description is intensified by the definitions of abandoned, neglected, orphaned. The overall picture of desolation is visually complemented by images of looted homes, wild pets, overgrown fields and gardens. The verbal image of a radiation-infected town / village is especially relevant for the texts of fiction and non-fiction. The authors quite motivatedly characterize post-accident cities with the help of epithets infected, doomed, unpromising. The associative-semantic deepening of the motif “abandoned, dead towns and villages in the exclusion zone” is provided by negative-evaluation images with the seed ‘silence’. In the linguistic portraitl of empty, uninhabited towns and villages, modal words no, no, negative pronouns and adverbs (nobody, nowhere) and verb constructions with negative particles no and no, constructions with a preposition without perform an important text-forming function. Indicative aspect of the description – the space above the city, the sky. This is objectively motivated by the artistic reflection of the fact that the cloud of radioactive contamination formed as a result of the explosion rose up, covering Chоrnobyl and Pripyat. The tension of the “ground” atmosphere in Pripyat and Chernobyl is described by verbs and verb compounds with the seeds ‘intensive traffic’, which metaphorize the intensity of traffic – to take off, snatch, race, fly, tear / jerk, jump. Together, they create a cinematic description characteristic of chronicle-documentary prose. This is facilitated by verbs with the seeds ‘to move quickly’, ‘to stop suddenly’, ‘to start moving suddenly’.

The article describes the activities of Konstantin Vysotsky (1836–1886), who was first to open a photographic studio (1866), a lithographic studio (1867), a printing house (1869), and a newspaper (1879) in Tyumen. The first consideration of Vysotsky in the context of the history of the media and their transformations/revolutions contributes to the novelty of the research. It allows for a description of his experience of media transformations in a Siberian regional town of the second half of the 19th century in a systematic way, as opposed to the local and fragmentary descriptions which existed in science until now. The research methodology is integrative in nature: the study of book printing as a cultural practice in connection with economic, social and cultural transformations within the boundaries of cultural history (F. Barbier) is combined with contextual and intertextual approaches, bibliological and structural-typological analysis. The research material contains Vysotsky’s book, photographic, lithographic, and newspaper heritage stored in the Russian National Library, Tobolsk Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, I.Ya. Slovtsov Museum Complex (Tyumen), and the Digital Collection of the University of Tyumen entitled K.N. Vysotsky and the Media Culture of Tyumen. Vysotsky is presented both as an object and a subject of the economic, technological, social, and cultural transformations of the city. He was actively and creatively changing it. Based on the analysis of Vysotsky’s journalistic and publishing activities, his role in the history of the Tyumen shipping company and railway is revealed. The connection between Vysotsky and the landscape transformations of the city is shown. The idea that Vysotsky’s figure can be interpreted in the context of the phenomenon of new people in Russia in the 1860s–1870s is introduced. It is shown that the Tyumen generation of new people (N.M. Chukmaldin, K.N. Vysotsky, I.A. Kalganov, etc.) with their daily practices (reading, self-education, movement towards “light and will”, a new order in servant-master relations) was being formed largely under the influence of Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? Tales of New People (1863), Nikolai Yadrintsev’s ideas of Siberian renovation, Ivan Turgenev’s interpretation of the image of Don Quixote (Hamlet and Don Quixote, 1860). Intertextual connections of the system of motifs revealing the image of new people in Nikolai Chukmaldin’s memoirs Notes on My Life (1902) and Chernyshevsky’s novel are presented. It is established that the first book published by Vysotsky, Charter of the Estate Manager Club in Tyumen, actually became a message about a new life of the city which Vysotsky and Chukmaldin addressed to the people of Tyumen. Another finding is the logic of Vysotsky’s professional development from photography to book printing. The author discusses the structure of the Vysotsky printing house repertoire dominated by documentary and non-fiction genres (road books, statutes, reports, calendars, catalogs, etc.). The complementarity of the book and visual (photographic and lithographic associated with the graphosphere) portraits of Tyumen created by Vysotsky contributed to a new hyper-reality which appeared in the city.

The article discusses ethnographic essays and novellas in the poems by Alexandra Andreevna Fuchs. The wife of a famous professor Karl Fuchs, she was resident of Kazan, hosted a literary salon, which was frequented by many local and visiting writers and poets, and met with Alexander Pushkin during his stay in the town. Alexandra Fuchs became the first Russian ethnographer writer; she purposefully traveled to places where the Chuvash, Mari (Cheremis), and Udmurts (Votyaks) lived, and wrote essays about the life, daily routine, manners and customs of these peoples drawing on her personal observations. Her essays took the form of letters and were often accompanied by response letters from her husband. They were published in the Kazan magazine Zavolzhsky Muravey [Zavolzhsky Ant], in the regional newspaper Kazanskie gubernskie vedomosti [Kazan Provincial Gazette], as well as in a number of separate books. The article analyzes the rhetorical peculiarities and author’s position of Alexandra Fuks’ essay writing. The analysis also involves ethnographic-fiction novellas (poems) by A. Fuchs, taken, according to her, “from the Tatar tradition”: ‘Princess Habiba’, ‘Founding of the city of Kazan’, a comment to which was written by her husband. These works fit into the tradition of the “Eastern novella”, popular in Russia since the eighteenth century. Depicting the exotic life of ancient Tatars and the peoples neighboring Kazan, Alexandra Fuchs sought to reconcile the orientation of the region to the East with the Orthodox-Imperial ideology which (in her view) was more advanced and progressive. Her sympathies as the author lay with female characters who contradicted traditional Muslim customs. Alexandra Fuchs’ essays and tales played a considerable role in awakening the interest of a Russian reader to the peoples of the empire, which preceded the mid-19th century rise of ethnography in science and literature.

Considered as one of the most influential crime fiction writers of our time, Val McDermid combines her works with Scotland’s city and town culture. Having the opportunity to closely observe the problems faced by the working class in the town of Fife where she spent her childhood, McDermid enriches her fiction with these narratives. These experiences led her to be the voice of the forgotten, oppressed, and marginalised segments of society in her later writing life. Also challenging the male-dominated structure of traditional crime fiction, McDermid brings a new atmosphere to crime fiction by creating fictional characters such as Lindsay Gordon. Classic crime fiction, which spent its golden age under the hegemony of British writers in the 1930s, presents the reader with stories in which typical male detectives are the protagonists. By the 1970s, Scottish crime fiction, or Tartan-Noir writers, produced essential works in this field. McDermid, who took the title of the Queen of crime fiction, puts women at the centre of her narrative, and in this way, she differs from male Tartan-Noir writers. In this study, McDermid, who deconstructed the male-dominated structure in traditional detective fiction and placed strong female detectives such as Lindsay Gordon into fiction, will be examined. Additionally, McDermid’s criticisms of the Margaret Thatcher period will be explained to readers with examples from her novels.

This article examines the cityscapes, residents’ experiences and different temporalities depicted in Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland, Zoo City and The Shining Girls. The analysis considers the cityscapes and everyday life experiences in the depicted cyber and futurist Cape Town, futurist fantasy Johannesburg and a cyclically time-travelled and crime-ridden Chicago. It also evaluates the role of the science fiction genre in presenting the sense of space in the different cities and in the process establishes possible comparable visions of urban experiences. Hence, the article argues that the link between space and time and genre assists in mapping the city’s and other worlds’ landscapes and the residents’ experiences vividly, and in that way enables the reader to imaginatively establish the social, spatial and other thematic commonalities between Beukes’s cyber and futurist Cape Town, futurist fantasy/magical Johannesburg and a crime-ridden Chicago that is explored through cyclical time-travelling.

IntroductionWe five friends clinked glasses in our favourite wine and cocktail bar, and considered our next collaborative writing project. We had seen M/C Journal’s call for articles for a special issue on ‘regional’ and when one of us mentioned the television program, Escape from the City, we began our critique:“They haven’t featured Armidale yet, but wouldn’t it be great if they did?”“Really? I mean, some say any publicity is good publicity but the few early episodes I’ve viewed seem to give little or no screen time to the sorts of lifestyle features I most value in our town.”“Well, seeing as we all moved here from the city ages ago, let’s talk about what made us stay?”We had found our next project.A currently popular lifestyle television show (Escape from the City) on Australia’s national public service broadcaster, the ABC, highlights the limitations of popular cultural representations of life in a regional centre. The program is targeted at viewers interested in relocating to regional Australia. As Raymond Boyle and Lisa Kelly note, popular television is an important entry point into the construction of public knowledge as well as a launching point for viewers as they seek additional information (65). In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of ‘reality’, televisual texts offer a significant insight into our understandings and expectations of what is going on around us. Similar to the concerns raised by Esther Peeren and Irina Souch in their analysis of the popular TV show Farmer Wants a Wife (a version set in the Netherlands from 2004–present), we worry that these shows “prevent important aspects of contemporary rural life from being seen and understood” (37) by the viewers, and do a disservice to regional communities.For the purposes of this article, we interrogate the episodes of Escape from the City screened to date in terms of the impact they may have on promoting regional Australia and speculate on how satisfied (or otherwise) we would be should the producers direct their lens onto our regional community—Armidale, in northern NSW. We start with a brief précis of Escape from the City and then, applying an autoethnographic approach (Butz and Besio) focusing on our subjective experiences, we share our reflections on living in Armidale. We blend our academic knowledge and knowledge of everyday life (Klevan et al.) to argue there is greater cultural diversity, complexity, and value in being in the natural landscape in regional areas than is portrayed in these representations of country life that largely focus on cheaper real estate and a five-minute commute.We employ an autoethnographic approach because it emphasises the socially and politically constituted nature of knowledge claims and allows us to focus on our own lives as a way of understanding larger social phenomena. We recognise there is a vast literature on lifestyle programs and there are many different approaches scholars can take to these. Some focus on the intention of the program, for example “the promotion of neoliberal citizenship through home investment” (White 578), while others focus on the supposed effect on audiences (Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak). Here we only assert the effects on ourselves. We have chosen to blend our voices (Gilmore et al.) in developing our arguments, highlighting our single voices where our individual experiences are drawn on, as we argue for an alternative representation of regional life than currently portrayed in the regional ‘escapes’ of this mainstream lifestyle television program.Lifestyle TelevisionEscape from the City is one of the ‘lifestyle’ series listed on the ABC iview website under the category of ‘Regional Australia’. Promotional details describe Escape from the City as a lifestyle series of 56-minute episodes in which home seekers are guided through “the trials and tribulations of their life-changing decision to escape the city” (iview).Escape from the City is an example of format television, a term used to describe programs that retain the structure and style of those produced in another country but change the circumstances to suit the new cultural context. The original BBC format is entitled Escape to the Country and has been running since 2002. The reach of lifestyle television is extensive, with the number of programs growing rapidly since 2000, not just in the United Kingdom, but internationally (Hill; Collins). In Australia, they have completed, but not yet screened, 60 episodes of Escape from the City. However, with such popularity comes great potential to influence audiences and we argue this program warrants critical attention.Like House Hunters, the United States lifestyle television show (running since 1997), Escape from the City follows “a strict formula” (Loof 168). Each episode uses the same narrative format, beginning with an introduction to the team of experts, then introducing the prospective house buyers, briefly characterising their reasons for leaving the city and what they are looking for in their new life. After this, we are shown a map of the region and the program follows the ‘escapees’ as they view four pre-selected houses. As we leave each property, the cost and features are reiterated in the written template on the screen. We, the audience, wait in anticipation for their final decision.The focus of Escape from the City is the buying of the house: the program’s team of experts is there to help the potential ‘escapees’ find the real estate gem. Real estate value for money emerges as the primary concern, while the promise of finding a ‘life less ordinary’ as highlighted in the opening credits of the program each week, seems to fall by the wayside. Indeed, the representation of regional centres is not nuanced but limited by the emphasis placed on economics over the social and cultural.The intended move of the ‘escapees’ is invariably portrayed as motivated by disenchantment with city life. Clearly a bigger house and a smaller mortgage also has its hedonistic side. In her study of Western society represented in lifestyle shows, Lyn Thomas lists some of the negative aspects of city life as “high speed, work-dominated, consumerist” (680), along with pollution and other associated health risks. While these are mentioned in Escape from the City, Thomas’s list of the pleasures afforded by a simpler country life including space for human connection and spirituality, is not explored to any satisfying extent. Further, as a launching point for viewers in the city (Boyle and Kelly), we fear the singular focus on the price of real estate reinforces a sense of the rural as devoid of creative arts and cultural diversity with a focus on the productive, rather than the natural, landscape. Such a focus does not encourage a desire to find out more and undersells the richness of our (regional) lives.As Australian regional centres strive to circumvent or halt the negative impacts of the drift in population to the cities (Chan), lifestyle programs are important ‘make or break’ narratives, shaping the appeal and bolstering—or not—a decision to relocate. With their focus on cheaper real estate prices and the freeing up of the assets of the ‘escapees’ that a move to the country may entail, the representation is so focused on the economics that it is almost placeless. While the format includes a map of the regional location, there is little sense of being in the place. Such a limited representation does not do justice to the richness of regional lives as we have experienced them.Our TownLike so many regional centres, Armidale has much to offer and is seeking to grow (Armidale Regional Council). The challenges regional communities face in sustaining their communities is well captured in Gabriele Chan’s account of the city-country divide (Chan) and Armidale, with its population of about 25,000, is no exception. Escape from the City fails to emphasise cultural diversity and richness, yet this is what characterises our experience of our regional city. As long-term and satisfied residents of Armidale, who are keenly aware of the persuasive power of popular cultural representations (O’Sullivan and Sheridan; Sheridan and O’Sullivan), we are concerned about the trivialising or reductive manner in which regional Australia is portrayed.While we acknowledge there has not been an episode of Escape from the City featuring Armidale, if the characterisation of another, although larger, regional centre, Toowoomba, is anything to go by, our worst fears may be realised if our town is to feature in the future. Toowoomba is depicted as rural landscapes, ‘elegant’ buildings, a garden festival (the “Carnival of the Flowers”) and the town’s history as home of the Southern Cross windmill and the iconic lamington sponge. The episode features an old shearing shed and a stock whip demonstration, but makes no mention of the arts, or of the University that has been there since 1967. Summing up Toowoomba, the voiceover describes it as “an understated and peaceful place to live,” and provides “an attractive alternative” to city life, substantiated by a favourable comparison of median real estate prices.Below we share our individual responses to the question raised in our opening conversation about the limitations of Escape from the City: What have we come to value about our own town since escaping from city life?Jane: The aspects of life in Armidale I most enjoy are, at least in part, associated with or influenced by the fact that this is a centre for education and a ‘university town’. As such, there is access to an academic library and an excellent town library. The presence of the University of New England, along with independent and public schools, and TAFE, makes education a major employer, attracting a significant student population, and is a major factor in Armidale being one of the first towns in the roll-out of the NBN/high-speed broadband. University staff and students may also account for the thriving cafe culture, along with designer breweries/bars, art house cinema screenings, and a lively classical and popular music scene. Surely the presence of a university and associated spin-offs would deserve coverage in a prospective episode about Armidale.Alison: Having grown up in the city, and now having lived more than half my life in an inner-regional country town, I don’t feel I am missing out ‘culturally’ from this decision. Within our town, there is a vibrant arts community, with the regional gallery and two local galleries holding regular art exhibitions, theatre at a range of venues, and book launches at our lively local book store. And when my children were younger, there was no shortage of sporting events they could be involved with. Encountering friends and familiar faces regularly at these events adds to my sense of belonging to my community. The richness of this life does not make it to the television screen in episodes of Escape from the City.Kerry: I greatly value the Armidale community’s strong social conscience. There are many examples of successful programs to support diverse groups. Armidale Sanctuary and Humanitarian Settlement sponsored South Sudanese refugees for many years and is currently assisting Ezidi refugees. In addition to the core Sanctuary committee, many in the local community help families with developing English skills, negotiating daily life, such as reading and responding to school notes and medical questionnaires. The Backtrack program assists troubled Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth. The program helps kids “to navigate their relationships, deal with personal trauma, take responsibility […] gain skills […] so they can eventually create a sustainable future for themselves.” The documentary film Backtrack Boys shows what can be achieved by individuals with the support of the community. Missing from Escape from the City is recognition of the indigenous experience and history in regional communities, unlike the BBC’s ‘original’ program in which medieval history and Vikings often get a ‘guernsey’. The 1838 Myall Creek massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people, led to the first prosecution and conviction of a European for killing Aboriginals. Members of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous community in Armidale are now active in acknowledging the past wrongs and beginning the process of reconciliation.Josie: About 10am on a recent Saturday morning I was walking from the car park to the shopping complex. Coming down the escalator and in the vestibule, there were about thirty people and it occurred to me that there were at least six nationalities represented, with some of the people wearing traditional dress. It also struck me that this is not unusual—we are a diverse community as a result of our history and being a ‘university city’. The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place was established in 1988 and is being extended in 2019. Diversity is apparent in cultural activities such as an international film festival held annually and many of the regular musical events and stalls at the farmers’ market increasingly reflect the cultural mix of our town. As a long-term resident, I appreciate the lifestyle here.Wendy: It is early morning and I am walking in a forest of tall trees, with just the sounds of cattle and black cockatoos. I travel along winding pathways with mossy boulders and creeks dry with drought. My dog barks at rabbits and ‘roos, and noses through the nooks and crannies of the hillside. In this public park on the outskirts of town, I can walk for two hours without seeing another person, or I can be part of a dog-walking pack. The light is grey and misty now, the ranges blue and dark green, but I feel peaceful and content. I came here from the city 30 years ago and hated it at first! But now I relish the way I can be at home in 10 minutes after starting the day in the midst of nature and feeling part of the landscape, not just a tourist—never a possibility in the city. I can watch the seasons and the animals as they come and go and be part of a community which is part of the landscape too. For me, the first verse of South of My Days, written by a ‘local’ describing our New England environment, captures this well:South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,rises that tableland, high delicate outlineof bony slopes wincing under the winter,low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapplebranching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;and the old cottage lurches in for shelter. (Wright 20)Whilst our autoethnographic reflections may not reach the heady heights of Judith Wright, they nevertheless reflect the experience of living in, not just escaping to the country. We are disappointed that the breadth of cultural activities and the sense of diversity and community that our stories evoke are absent from the representations of regional communities in Escape from the City.Kate Oakley and Jonathon Ward argue that ‘visions of the good life’, in particular cultural life in the regions, need to be supported by policy which encourages a sustainable prosperity characterised by both economic and cultural development. Escape from the City, however, dwells on the material aspects of consumption—good house prices and the possibility of a private enterprise—almost to the exclusion of any coverage of the creative cultural features.We recognise that the lifestyle genre requires simplification for viewers to digest. What we are challenging is the sense that emerges from the repetitive format week after week whereby differences between places are lost (White 580). Instead what is conveyed in Escape from the City is that regions are homogenous and monocultural. We would like to see more screen time devoted to the social and cultural aspects of the individual locations.ConclusionWe believe coverage of a far richer and more complex nature of rural life would provide a more ‘realistic’ preview of what could be ahead for the ‘escapees’ and perhaps swing the decision to relocate. Certainly, there is some evidence that viewers gain information from lifestyle programs (Hill 106). We are concerned that a lifestyle television program that purports to provide expert advice on the benefits and possible pitfalls of a possible move to the country should be as accurate and all-encompassing as possible within the constraints of the length of the program and the genre.So, returning to what may appear to have been a light-hearted exchange between us at our local bar, and given the above discussion, we argue that television is a powerful medium. We conclude that a popular lifestyle television program such as Escape from the City has an impact on a large viewing audience. For those city-based viewers watching, the message is that moving to the country is an economic ‘no brainer’, whereas the social and cultural dimensions of regional communities, which we posit have sustained our lives, are overlooked. Such texts influence viewers’ perceptions and expectations of what escaping to the country may entail. Escape from the City exploits regional towns as subject matter for a lifestyle program but does not significantly challenge stereotypical representations of country life or does not fully flesh out what escaping to the country may achieve.ReferencesArmidale Regional Council. Community Strategic Plan 2017–2027. Armidale: Armidale Regional Council, 2017.“Backtrack Boys.” Dir. Catherine Scott. Sydney: Umbrella Entertainment, 2018.Boyle, Raymond, and Lisa W. Kelly. “Television, Business Entertainment and Civic Culture.” Television and New Media 14.1 (2013): 62–70.Butz, David, and Kathryn Besio. “Autoethnography.” Geography Compass 3.5 (2009): 1660–74.Chan, Gabrielle. Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up. Australia: Vintage, 2018.Collins, Megan. Classical and Contemporary Social Theory: The New Narcissus in the Age of Reality Television. Routledge, 2018.Gilmore, Sarah, Nancy Harding, Jenny Helin, and Alison Pullen. “Writing Differently.” Management Learning 50.1 (2019): 3–10.Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge, 2004.iview. “Escape from the City.” Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019.Klevan, Trude, Bengt Karlsson, Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, and Alec Grant. “‘Aha! ‘Take on Me’s’: Bridging the North Sea with Relational Autoethnography.” Qualitative Research Journal 18.4 (2018): 330–44.Loof, Travis. “A Narrative Criticism of Lifestyle Reality Programs.” Journal of Media Critiques 1.5 (2015): 167–78.O’Sullivan, Jane, and Alison Sheridan. “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King: Tall Tales of New Men and New Management in The Bill.” Gender, Work and Organization 12.4 (2005): 299–318.Oakley, Kate, and Jonathon Ward. “The Art of the Good Life: Culture and Sustainable Prosperity.” Cultural Trends 27.1 (2018): 4–17.Peeren, Esther, and Irina Souch. “Romance in the Cowshed: Challenging and Reaffirming the Rural Idyll in the Dutch Reality TV Show Farmer Wants a Wife.” Journal of Rural Studies 67.1 (2019): 37–45.Sheridan, Alison, and Jane O’Sullivan. “‘Fact’ and ‘Fiction’: Enlivening Health Care Education.” Journal of Health Orgnaization and Management 27.5 (2013): 561–76.Thomas, Lyn. “Alternative Realities: Downshifting Narratives in Contemporary Lifestyle Television.” Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 680–99.Tsay-Vogel, Mina, and K. Maja Krakowiak. “Exploring Viewers’ Responses to Nine Reality TV Subgenres.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 6.4 (2017): 348–60.White, Mimi. “‘A House Divided’.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (2017): 575–91.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.

Artiklis on vaadeldud Narva ja Sillamäe linnast inspireeritud kirjandust ja üht mängufilmi, mis tegelevad lähemalt maastikuloomega ning kohamälu tekitamisega pärast II maailmasõda. Sõjajärgse Kirde-Eesti ülesehitamine tööstuspiirkonnana on peegeldunud memuaristikas, tagasivaatelistes omaeluloolistes tekstides ning oma kaasajas ehitust kajastavates allikates. Vaadeldud näited avavad seda, kuidas on kirjeldatud nõukogude perioodi tööstuslinna, alustades sõjajärgsest taastamistööst ning lõpetades Andrei Hvostovi tagasivaatega nõukogudeaegsele lapsepõlvelinnale. Tekstide analüüs võimaldab märgata sõjaeelse maastiku transformeerumist tööstusmaastikuks, selle kajastuste vastuolulisust ning sõltuvust kirjutamisajast. The article observes literary depictions of two towns in North-East Estonia, Narva and Sillamäe, both of which were reconstructed as industrial towns after World War II, in fiction, life writing and a film script, as well as in a feature film made on the basis of the latter. The texts are simultaneously engaged in the making of landscape and creation of local memory after the region’s dramatic change caused by the war. Ida-Virumaa became an industrial region in the second half of the nineteenth century; the Kreenholm Textile factory was one of the world’s largest by the end of the century. In 1916, industrial mining for oil shale was started in North-East Estonia. Oil shale was a strategic resource in World War II as well. In 1944, with the second occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union, uranium mining was started as a secret object of interest for the military industry. The historical town of Narva was almost completely destroyed in World War II. Few buildings were restored, while the city was filled with blocks of flats typical of the Soviet period and the historical street network was transformed significantly. Still, Narva did not become a utopian Stalinist city – in Estonia, the only example of the latter is Sillamäe, a closed city built according to an all-Union standardised project, that attempted to embody an image of Communist happiness. Postwar literary depictions of Narva have often proceeded from the baroque city centre that has become a separate symbolic site of memory. In the more recent past, different genres have started to complement one another, different periods have been compared and, as a result, representations of various spaces have received a more analytic artistic treatment that connects the pre-war period with the post-war one. The first set of texts discussed here consists of POW memoirs of the immediate post-war reconstruction works, set down some decades later. After that, contemporary reflections of the reconstruction in Soviet Estonia in the 1950s-1960s are considered. Finally, attention is paid to texts that comment on the reconstruction era from a larger temporal distance: a backward look at Soviet-time Sillamäe from 2011 (expanded edition 2014) by Andrei Hvostov, a journalist with a degree in history, who spent his childhood in the town. Hvostov’s memoirs and his short stories on similar topics that were published earlier serve as attempts at parallel interpretations of several possible local memories. A work that in a way unites all three periods is Vladimir Beekman’s novel The Narva Waterfall (1986). Its protagonist Stiina was born and grew up in Narva, left the war-ravaged city and criticises harshly the changes that have taken place in the city. The examples of memoirs, retrospective autobiographical texts and sources reflecting their contemporary period also reveal how industrial cities of the Soviet era have been depicted in different periods. An analysis of the texts discloses the transformation of the prewar landscape into an industrial one, the contradictory nature of its descriptions, as well as dependence of the latter on the time of writing. Examples are given of the possibilities of representing large-scale industrial constructions that significantly also involve not just the creation of new values but also the way of doing this – reflecting the work of the udarniki of the Young Communist League. According to Katerina Clark’s typology of Stalinist novels, one of the texts observed, the film script concerning the shock workers’ building of the Balti Thermal Power Plant to which the youth from the Young Communist League contributed, can be categorised as the most widespread and ritualised type of Soviet fiction, the so-called production novel. The selection of texts discussed in the article is by no means exhaustive and the Ida-Virumaa region may offer fruitful material for future studies using the categories of space and memory, both as regards ways of describing a real region in literature as well as analysing the stories clustered around a site of memory. The notion of a literary city emerging in the texts is broad, as areas and objects with different functions form part of it. The observed texts display an interesting conflict in spatial memory: a deliberate loss of memory induced during a certain period and the creating of something new as if into a void can be emphasised as can be using rhetorical devices to bring forth a new spatial representation, a site of memory in its own right.

A Year in the City is a mosaic novel set in contemporary an historical Sydney. It is 70, 000 words long, and contains twelve different narratives, with the American author Mark Twain appearing as a fictional character in the opening and closing. A Year in the City seeks to represent the fragmented, multicultural nature of Sydney through a diverse range of narrators and styles. Each of the chapters is linked through the themes of belonging, race, land ownership. The Sydney portrayed in the novel is what Leonie Sandercock called a Mongrel City, a metaphor used to characterise the "new urban condition in which difference, otherness, fragmentation, splintering, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity, [and] plurality prevail." A Year in the City intends to celebrate cultural and racial heterogeneity. It is accompanied by a research dissertation of 30, 000 words, that investigates the project of writing about the city and the theme of race. It explores the imagined city through the work of James Donald and Ross Gibson, and addresses the challenge of capturing the lived experience in text, as theorised by Henri Lefebvre. The mosaic structure of A Year in the City borrows from Michel de Certeau's theory of walking the city and Walter Benjamin's flaneur. The issue of race is discussed in relation to the representation of white and non-white characters against the dominant white society.

The dissertation attempted to study the urban fiction of Chi Li (1957- ) through a detail analysis of her texts. Being one of the leaders of Chinese New Realism, Chi Li always tried to write about the real life and living conditions of urban people, which actually expressed her understanding and interpretation of city. This thesis would like to discuss the images of cities in Chi Li’s writings, her feelings on urbanization, and also try to evaluate her contribution to the evolution of contemporary Chinese urban fiction. The thesis consisted of five chapters. Chapter one clarified the basic concepts of urban literature and reviewed the development of Chinese urban fiction. Besides, previous research works on Chi Li were briefly introduced. The second chapter studied the urban-rural relations in Chi Li’s textual depiction. City and countryside, bearing two different characteristics of social life and culture, had met and influenced each other in a large scale twice after The thesis consisted of five chapters. Chapter one clarified the basic concepts of urban literature and reviewed the development of Chinese urban fiction. Besides, previous research works on Chi Li were briefly introduced. The second chapter studied the urban-rural relations in Chi Li’s textual depiction. City and countryside, bearing two different characteristics of social life and culture, had met and influenced each other in a large scale twice after
published_or_final_version
Chinese
Master
Master of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009.
Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-200). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

In the following nine linked stories, characters from disparate backgrounds and socio-economic strata converge in a rural community along the Missouri river in central Montana. A Texas-based oil exploration and production company takes up residence in the area, causing a stir in the neighborhood. Long-time local residents experience their daily lives amid a tourist driven economy and reaffirm their aspirations to leave despite significant obstacles and limitations. In "Show Me the Way to Go Home," a young waitress is stranded after a car accident and seeks help from residents living on the single row of houses in the area. In "Give Death Grace," a resident artist leaves to resolve her tumultuous past with her father. In "A Good Little Fisherwoman," a woman deals with the repercussions of her recent reproductive decisions during a fishing trip. In "Little Fires," a local man deals with the tragic burn injury of a child while also facing deeply rooted resentments with his mother. In "Dwelling," an aging local must decide whether or not she will sell her home to two strangers. In "Other Important Areas of Functioning," a woman decides to discontinue her mood stabilizing medications in favor of a more natural lifestyle. While this place means something different to each of these characters, they all coexist while facing individual challenges.

This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.

At the end of the introduction to my book Roman Palestine, 200-400, the Land: Crisis and Change in Agrarian Society as Reflected in Rabbinic Sources (1978), I wrote: “Finally, developments in the rural community cannot be divorced from those of the urban community. The two communities are mutually interdependent, their interactions significant for each as for both. This I hope will be shown in a future volume dealing with the conditions of urban life during the same centuries”. Some fifteen years have passed, and I have still not fulfilled that hope. This volume only satisfies my promise of a supplementary volume in a partial manner. Whereas the two former volumes, Roman Palestine, 200-400, Money and Prices (1974; 2nd edition, 1991) and the volume quoted above, presented a socioeconomic historical thesis, the present volume does not. Hence its chronological parameters have been broadened to encompass much of the Tannaitic period, and it covers a period of some three hundred years, from ca. 100 to 400 C.E. Unlike the present-day studies of ancient urban history, it does not deal with a specific city—for example, Tiberias, Sepphoris, Caesarea, or Lod—and is thus unlike the excellent studies of Lee I. Levine on Caesarea, Joshua J. Schwartz on Lod, Stuart S. Miller on Sepphoris, Gustav Hermansen on Ostia, and more recently, Donald W. Engels on Roman Corinth. My book synthesizes what is known of urban life in Talmudic Palestine and hence deals with a theoretical, nonexistent, “synthetic” city.” The reader will readily see that I have been greatly influenced by Jerome Carcopino’s seminal work on everyday life in Roman times, the classic Daily Life in Ancient Rome, which to a great extent set the tone for this genre of writing. However, he was writing about a specific town. In a sense, my narrative is closer in character to A. H. M. Jones’s paradigmatic The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian. I have also been somewhat influenced by W. A. Becker’s Gallus, or Roman Scenes of the Time of Augustus, although from a literary point of view, his work is closer to historical fiction.

It is a weekend in early January 2009. The location is a medium-sized city in the west of England. It is interesting to compare the scene with the photograph of the officer in the snow in 1974 with which we started this journey. It is bright, sunny, and cold. It is not yet snowing; that would follow the next month. Britain had recently entered an economic recession of fearsome dimensions, although unemployment had not yet returned to the levels of the 1980s. Like in 1974 there is police presence in the town. Two police officers are on foot patrol, but they bear only a passing resemblance to the appearance of the 1974 officer. The 2009 officers are patrolling as a pair, dressed in lightweight fluorescent anoraks. One, a woman, wears a reinforced bowler hat, the other, a man, wears a flat cap. Neither holds the office of constable, for they are both PCSOs. There are police constables aplenty on duty that morning, but they are busy conducting searches following arrests for shoplifting under section 18 of PACE, legislation unknown to the 1974 constable. The PCSOs are equipped with Airwave radios, a quantum leap of technology compared to the primitive devices available 35 years previously. In 1974 officers did not then have guaranteed access to PNC, whereas the 2009 officers enjoy routine and speedy access to PNC and a range of other databases. Watching over all, police officers and public alike, are a proliferation of CCTV cameras, some of which are also linked to the databases. The officers are in turn supported by a range of sophisticated forensic and surveillance technology which would have seemed the stuff of science fiction in 1974. Out of sight, detectives still investigate, but they are supported by a range of other specialist investigators, many of whom are ‘civilian employees’. Bureaucracy governed the working life of the 1974 officer as it does those of 2009, but with a difference: in 1974 it was principally of the administrative variety, generated and controlled locally; by 2009 more is generated nationally, often associated with the criminal justice system, which has gone some way to restricting individual discretion. In 1974, law, convention, and administrative procedures, like Judges’ Rules, would have framed an officer’s working life; by 2009 much is dictated by statute law, secondary legislation, ‘doctrine’, ‘guidance’, or ‘practice advice’ emanating from the ‘centre’, whether that is in the form of the Home Office, NPIA, or ACPO. Behind the scenes national inspectorate bodies of a far greater reach than those of 1974 hunt for deviation from standard norms. The chief constables, who still have responsibility to direct and control the vast array of resources under their command, are themselves hedged in by rules, targets, and restrictions which their colleagues of earlier times would find hard to imagine.