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Heroes in Contemporary British Culture by Barbara Korte,Nicole Falkenhayner Pdf
This book explores how British culture is negotiating heroes and heroisms in the twenty-first century. It posits a nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation and explores this idea through British television drama. Drawing on case studies including programmes such as The Last Kingdom, Spooks, Luther and Merlin, the book explores the aesthetic strategies of heroisation in television drama and contextualises the programmes within British public discourses at the time of their production, original broadcasting and first reception. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain’s problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated. By revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms, television drama employs the heroic as a lens through which to scrutinise contemporary British society and its responses to crisis and change. Looking back on the development of heroic representations in British television drama over the last twenty years, this book’s analyses show how heroisation in television drama reacts to, and reveals shifts in, British structures of feeling in a time marked by insecurity. The book is ideal for readers interested in British cultural studies, studies of the heroic and popular culture.
Heroes and Villains of the British Empire by Stephen Basdeo Pdf
From the sixteenth until the twentieth century, British power and influence gradually expanded to cover one quarter of the world’s surface. The common saying was that “the sun never sets on the British Empire”. What began as a largely entrepreneurial enterprise in the early modern period, with privately run joint stock trading companies such as the East India Company driving British commercial expansion, by the nineteenth century had become, especially after 1857, a state-run endeavor, supported by a powerful military and navy. By the Victorian era, Britannia really did rule the waves. Heroes of the British Empire is the story of how British Empire builders such as Robert Clive, General Gordon, and Lord Roberts of Kandahar were represented and idealized in popular culture. The men who built the empire were often portrayed as possessing certain unique abilities which enabled them to serve their country in often inhospitable territories, and spread what imperial ideologues saw as the benefits of the British Empire to supposedly uncivilized peoples in far flung corners of the world. These qualities and abilities were athleticism, a sense of fair play, devotion to God, and a fervent sense of duty and loyalty to the nation and the empire. Through the example of these heroes, people in Britain, and children in particular, were encouraged to sign up and serve the empire or, in the words of Henry Newbolt, “Play up! Play up! And Play the Game!” Yet this was not the whole story: while some writers were paid up imperial propagandists, other writers in England detested the very idea of the British Empire. And in the twentieth century, those who were once considered as heroic military men were condemned as racist rulers and exploitative empire builders.
This highly anticipated study examines the content of low and middle-brow film and fiction that was widely consumed by Britons in the turbulent decades between the wars. Departing from a prevailing emphasis on mass culture as both escapist and largely democratic, Christine Grandy offers a fresh perspective by noting the enduring importance of class and gender divisions in narratives read and watched by the British working and middle classes. Heroes and happy endings examines an impressive number of popular films and novels, providing a comprehensive understanding of both the popular culture that arose in the 1920s and 1930s and the themes that persisted within it. Organised around the heroes, villains, and love-interests that populated these works, this book ends with an innovative look at the role that censorship played in shaping popular narratives in the period. Grandy demonstrates that contemporary concerns about ex-soldiers, profiteers, and working and voting women all found their way into the construction, consumption and censorship of masculine protagonists, scheming villains and swooning love-interests as they lived on the page and the screen. An important and highly readable work for scholars and students interested in cultural and social history, as well as media and film studies, this book is sure to shift our understanding of the role of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s.
Soldier Heroes explores the imagining of masculinities within adventure stories. Drawing on literary theory, cultural materialism and Kleinian psychoanalysis, it analyses modern British adventure heroes as historical forms of masculinity originating in the era of nineteenth-century popular imperialism, traces their subsequent transformations and examines the way these identities are internalized and lived by men and boys.
Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture by Barbara Korte,Simon Wendt,Nicole Falkenhayner Pdf
Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.
Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story by Barbara Korte,Laura Ma Lojo-Rodríguez Pdf
This book represents a contribution to both border studies and short story studies. In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide: as material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. This collection of critical essays focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. At the same time, the concept of the border, as well as neighbouring notions of liminality and intersectionality, is used to illuminate the short story’s unique aesthetic potential. The first section, “Geopolitics and Grievable Lives”, includes chapters that address the various ways in which contemporary stories engage with our newly bordered world and borders within contemporary Britain. The second section examines how British short stories engage with “Ethnicity and Liminal Identities”, while the third, “Animal Encounters and Metamorphic Bodies”, focuses on stories concerned with epistemological borders and borderlands of existence and identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the varied and complex ways in which British short stories in the twenty-first century engage with the concept of the border.
The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture by Michael Higgins,Clarissa Smith,John Storey Pdf
British culture today is the product of a shifting combination of tradition and experimentation, national identity and regional and ethnic diversity. These distinctive tensions are expressed in a range of cultural arenas, such as art, sport, journalism, fashion, education, and race. This Companion addresses these and other major aspects of British culture, and offers a sophisticated understanding of what it means to study and think about the diverse cultural landscapes of contemporary Britain. Each contributor looks at the language through which culture is formed and expressed, the political and institutional trends that shape culture, and at the role of culture in daily life. This interesting and informative account of modern British culture embraces controversy and debate, and never loses sight of the fact that Britain and Britishness must always be understood in relation to the increasingly international context of globalisation.
Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800 by Barbara Korte,Stefanie Lethbridge Pdf
This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century.
British Cultural Identities by Mike Storry,Peter Childs Pdf
A clear introduction to British culture and 'identity', giving readers an insider's view on the way British people perceive themselves, and are positioned by their culture. Tables, photo- graphs and exercises make this an ideal text.
The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 by Neil Ramsey Pdf
Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.
Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity by David Berry Pdf
In 2008 another economic crisis emerged in the long history of capitalism which created a period of ‘austerity economics’ across many nations. Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity examines how austerity has impacted upon cultural politics in relation to understanding how established power is both maintained and challenged. The book begins by detailing the meaning of cultural politics before exploring themes such as media discourse, austerity narratives, class, cultural hegemony/government policymaking, social movements and the European Union, and left responses to austerity. It also includes chapters tracing cultural politics in Spain, with a focus on anti-austerity movements and the relationship between austerity and Spanish football. Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity assesses the impact of a range of cultural/political forms concerning the dynamics of society and relations of power during times of crisis. As such, it will appeal to scholars of culture, media, politics, philosophy, sociology and social psychology.
Media Archaeology by Erkki Huhtamo,Jussi Parikka Pdf
“Huhtamo and Parikka, from the first and second generations of media archaeology, have brought together the best writings from almost all of the best authors in the field. Whether we speak of cultural materialism, media art history, new historicism or software studies, the essays compiled here provide not only an anthology of innovative historical case studies, but also a methodology for the future of media studies as material and historical analysis. Media Archaeology is destined to be a key handbook for a new generation of media scholars.” —Sean Cubitt, author of The Cinema Effect "Taken together, this excellent collection of essays by a wide range of scholars and practitioners demonstrates how the emerging field of media archaeology not only excavates the ways in which newer media work to remediate earlier forms and practices but also sketches out how older media help to premediate new ones." —Richard Grusin, author of Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 “In Media Archaeology, a constellation of interdisciplinary writers explore society’s relationship with the technological imaginary through history, with fascinating essays on influencing machines, Freud as media theorist, interactive games from the 19th century to the present day, just to name a few. As an artist, my mind is set on fire by discussions of the marvelous inventions that never made it to the mainstream, such as optophonic poetry, Christopher Strachey’s 1952 ‘Love letter generator’ for the Manchester Mark II computer, and the ‘Baby talkie.’” —Zoe Beloff, artist and editor of The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle "A long-awaited synthesis addressing media archaeology in all of its epistemological complexity. With wide-ranging intellectual breath and creative insight, Huhtamo and Parikka bring together an eminent array of international scholars in film and media studies, literary criticism, and history of science in the spirit of making the discourse of the humanities legible to artist-intellectuals. This foundational volume enables a sophisticated understanding of reproducible audiovisual media culture as apparatus, historical form, and avant-garde space of play." —Peter J. Bloom, author of French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism "An essential read for everyone interested in the histories of media and art." —Oliver Grau, author of MediaArtHistories "Media archaeology is a wonderful new shadow field. If you are willing to step outside the glow of new media, this book's approaches can shift how you experience the objects and experiences that fill the new everyday of contemporary life. No one captures the beauty of studying new media in the shadow of older media implements and practices better than Erkki Huhtamo, the Finnish writer, curator, and scholar of media technology and design famous for his creative work as a preservationist and an interpreter of pre-cinematic technologies of visual display. He has teamed up here with Jussi Parikka, the Finnish scholar who has brought us an insect theory of media, to give us this long-awaited collection of essays in media archaeology. The surprise of the book is that the essays collectively bring forward a range of approaches to considering archaeological practice, giving us new ways to think about our embodied and subjective orientations to technologies and objects through the lens of the material remnants of practice, rather than offering a narrow definition of the field. The collection moves between computational machines and influencing machines, preservation and imagination, offering a range of ways to live the new everyday of media experience through the imaginary of archaeology." —Lisa Cartwright, co-author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture “Where McLuhan’s Understanding Media ends, Media Archaeology actually begins. Refusing the often futile search for the eternal laws of media, Media Archaeology does something more difficult and rare. It literally brings the history of media alive by drawing into presence the enigmatic, heterogeneous, unruly past of the media—its artifacts, machines, imaginaries, tactics, and games. What results is a fabulous cabinet of (media) memories: the imaginary moving with kinetic frenzy, histories of what happens when media collide in the electronic space of the virtual, and stories about those strange interstitial spaces between analogue and digital.” —Arthur Kroker, author of The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism “Rupturing the continuities and established values of traditional media history, this exciting and thought-provoking collection makes a significant contribution to our understanding of media culture, and demonstrates that the presence of the past in present-day media is central to the recognition and re-cognition that media archaeology promotes.” —John Fullerton, editor of Screen Culture: History and Textuality “Here, at last, is a collection of essays that are a critical step to comprehending the history of our impulse to see ourselves in the machines we have made. This could be the beginning of 'Archaeology of Intention.'" —Bernie Lubell, artist “Huhtamo and Parikka’s expertly curated collection is a kaleidoscopic tour of media archaeology, giving us forceful evidence of that unruly domain’s vitality while preserving its wonderful unpredictability. With this essential volume, countless new paths have been opened up for media and cultural historians." —Charles R. Acland, author of Screen Traffic “This brilliant collection of essays provides much needed material and historical grounding for our understanding of new media. At the same time, it animates that ground by recognizing the integral roles that imagination, embodiment, and even productive disturbance play in media historiography. Yet these essays constitute more than a collection of historical case studies; together, they transform the book’s subject into its overall method. Media Archaeology performs media archaeology. Huhtamo and Parikka excavate the intellectual traditions and map the epistemological terrain of media archaeology itself, demonstrating that the field is ripe with possibilities not only for further historical examination, but also for imagining exciting new scholarly and creative futures.” —Shannon Mattern, The New School
British Cultural Identities by Mike Storry,Peter Childs Pdf
The second edition of this successful book analyses contemporary British identity from the various and changing ways. Right up to date, it covers such phenomena as Posh and Becks, Big Brother, the Millenium Dome and Harry Potter.
From Servants of the Empire to Everyday Heroes by Tobias Harper Pdf
In the twentieth century, the British Crown appointed around a hundred thousand people - military and civilian - in Britain and the British Empire to honours and titles. For outsiders, and sometimes recipients too, these jumbles of letters are tantalizingly confusing: OM, MBE, GCVO, CH, KB, or CBE. Throughout the century, this system expanded to include different kinds of people, while also shrinking in its imperial scope with the declining empire. Through these dual processes, this profoundly hierarchical system underwent a seemingly counter-intuitive change: it democratized. Why and how did the British government change this system? And how did its various publics respond to it? This study addresses these questions directly by looking at the history of the honours system in the wider context of the major historical changes in Britain and the British Empire in the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the evolution of this hierarchical, deferential system amidst democratization and decolonization. It focuses on the system's largest-and most important-components: the Order of the British Empire, the Knight Bachelor, and the lower ranks of other Orders. By creatively analysing the politics and administration of the system alongside popular responses to it in diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Tobias Harper shows the many different meanings that honours took on for the establishment, dissidents, and recipients. He also shows the ways in which the system succeeded and failed to order and bring together divided societies.
The fallout from Brexit and Covid-19, ongoing political turmoil, economic decline and calls for a second Scottish independence referendum make for deeply uncertain times in contemporary Britain. What will the country look like in five years from now? Will it even exist in its present form? Introducing you to all aspects of British history, geography, society, politics, economy and culture, this book guides you through the country's enduring features and recent trends: -Growing racial, religious, national and cultural diversity -Demographic shifts, including the move from a welfare state to a stakeholder society -The altered balance of power among government institutions, as the UK adapts to life outside the EU -Shifts in economic policy, following the impact of Brexit, Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine -Changing voter attitudes, with questions raised about the balance between the major political parties -The impact of social media and alternative communications channels on media, culture and politics. With key data, further reading suggestions and case studies on topics such as attitudes towards the monarchy, regional inequalities and national cuisine, Contemporary Britain is the ideal introduction for students and interested general readers alike.