Politics in Fantasy Media

Politics in Fantasy Media
Author: Gerold Sedlmayr
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0786495103

Fantasy is often condemned as escapist, unsophisticated and superficial. This collection of new essays puts such easy dismissals to the test by examining the ways in which Fantasy narratives present diverse, politically relevant discourses--gender, race, religion or consumerism--and thereby serve as indicators of their real-world contexts. Through their depiction of other worlds allegedly disconnected from our own, these texts are able to actualize political attitudes. Instead of categorizing Fantasy either as conservative or progressive, the essays suggest that its generic peculiarity allows the emergence of productive forms of oscillation between these extremes. Covered are J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, the vampire TV series True Blood, and the dystopian computer game Fallout 3.

Shades of Gray

Shades of Gray
Author: Dietmar Böhnke
Publisher: Galda & Wilch
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2004
Genre: Literature and history
ISBN: 9783931397548

The Tempest: A Critical Reader

The Tempest: A Critical Reader
Author: Alden T. Vaughan
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147251842X

The Tempest contains sublime poetry and catchy songs, magic and low comedy, while it tackles important contemporary concerns: education, power politics, the effects of colonization, and technology. In this guide, Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan open up new ways into one of Shakespeare's most popular, malleable and controversial plays.

Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time

Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 716
Release: 2020-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 311069378X

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

History, Literature, Critical Theory

History, Literature, Critical Theory
Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801467764

In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature

The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature
Author: B. Mennel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137069996

Defining masochism as 'literary perversion', this book probes the productivity of masochistic aesthetics in the literature of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and contemporary queer films, analysing radical accounts of desire, gender, and sexuality.

Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany

Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany
Author: Selma Rezgui
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2024
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1640141553

Essays on and interviews with minoritized writers of contemporary Germany, mostly women or non-binary, whose literary interventions write radical diversity into the dominant culture and challenge fixed frames of identity. In Germany today, an increasing number of minoritized authors - many of them women, nonbinary, or other marginalized genders - are staging literary interventions that foreground the long-standing complexity and radical diversity of German identities. They are reconceiving, redefining, and rewriting understandings of "Germanness" by centering previously marginalized perspectives and challenging fixed frames of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, and even time and space. In so doing, they open new ways of conceiving of self and other, individual and collective, and thus envision alliances and communities that do justice to the range of lived experiences in Germany. Drawing on frameworks of postmigration, postcolonialism, intersectionality, critical race and whiteness studies, and feminist and queer theory, this volume investigates various literary strategies employed by writers representing diverse subject positions to engage creatively with questions of hegemonic culture and belonging, exposing the exclusionary if not violent practices that these entail. The volume showcases cutting-edge scholarship by established and early career researchers, and is innovative in format: essays treating works by authors such as Fatma Aydemir, Shida Bazyar, Asal Dardan, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Antje Rávik Strubel, Noah Sow, Jackie Thomae, and Olivia Wenzel, along with original interviews with Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo, Özlem Özgül Dündar, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Mithu Sanyal illustrate the plurality, agency, and increasing resonance of these literary figures and their works. The chapter by Leila Essa, "Seen as Friendly, Seen as Frightening? A Conversation on Visibilities, Kinship, and the Right Words with Mithu Sanyal," is made freely available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.

After Memory

After Memory
Author: Matthias Schwartz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110713837

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.