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Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence
Previously considered an avowed nationalist, this book explores how Ian Fleming's writings and his representational politics contain an implicit resistance to imperial rhetoric. Through an examination of Fleming's Jamaica-set novels Live and Let Die, Dr. No, and The Man with the Golden Gun, as well as the later film adaptations of these novels, Ian Kinane reveals Fleming's deep ambivalence to British decolonisation and to wider Anglo-Caribbean relations. Offered here is a crucial insight into the public imagination during the birth of modern British multiculturalism that encompasses broader links between Fleming's writings on race and the representation of early British-Jamaican cultural relations. By exploring the effects of racial representation in these popular works, Kinane connects the novels to more contemporary concerns regarding migration and the ways in which the misrepresentation of cultures, races, and peoples has led to fraught and contentious global geo-political relations as figured in the fictional icon, James Bond.
Castaway Bodies in the Eighteenth–Century English Robinsonade
Exploring the metamorphoses of the body in the eighteenth-century Robinsonade as a crucial aspect of the genre’s ideologies, Castaway Bodies offers focused readings of intriguing, yet often forgotten, novels: Peter Longueville’s The English Hermit (1727), Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1751) and The Female American (1767) by an anonymous author. The book shows that by rewriting the myths of the New Adam, the Androgyne and the Amazon, respectively, these novels went beyond, though not completely counter to, the politics of conquest and mastery that are typically associated with the Robinsonade. It argues that even if these narratives could still be read as colonial fantasies, they opened a space for more consistent rejections of the imperial agenda in contemporary castaway fiction.
Marie-Antoinette’s Legacy
Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts—queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugénie—constructed their gardens betwixt and between court ritual and personal agency, where they transgressed sociopolitical boundaries in order to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.
The Architecture and Geography of Sound Studios
This is a book about sound studios, focusing on their architectural and geographical aspects. It explores how music is materialized under specific spatial and technological conditions and the myths associated with this process. Through ten in-depth studies, it examines the design, evolution and current function of sound studios amidst economic and technological shifts in the music industry. Traditional studios are in flux between the past and future. The industry, while steeped in romanticism and nostalgia, also embraces forward-driven pragmatism and an extensive reuse culture, encompassing heritage audio, building materials and existing buildings. A surprisingly diverse architectural herita...
Rewriting Crusoe
Published in 1719, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade's endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context.
The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds
This companion provides a definitive and cutting-edge guide to the study of imaginary and virtual worlds across a range of media, including literature, television, film, and games. From the Star Trek universe, Thomas More’s classic Utopia, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda, to elaborate, user-created game worlds like Minecraft, contributors present interdisciplinary perspectives on authorship, world structure/design, and narrative. The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds offers new approaches to imaginary worlds as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of world-building, and studies of specific worlds and worldbuilders.
Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction
Provides a unique snapshot of themes and trends within popular fiction in the twenty-first centuryThis groundbreaking collection captures the state of popular fiction in present day. It features twenty new essays on key authors associated with a wide range of genres and sub-genres, providing chapter-length discussions of major post-2000 works of contemporary popular fiction. The lively, accessible and academically rigorous essays presented here cover a wider range of established popular fiction genres such as fantasy, horror and the romance, as well as more niche areas such as Domestic Noir, Steampunk, the New Weird, Nordic Noir and Zombie Lit. The collection will primarily appeal to undergr...
Theorising Literary Islands
Theorising Literary Islands is a literary and cultural study of both how and why the trope of the island functions within contemporary popular Robinsonade narratives. It traces the development of Western “islomania” – or our obsession with islands – from its origins in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe right up to contemporary Robinsonade texts, focusing predominantly on American and European representations of fictionalized Pacific Island topographies in contemporary literature, film, television, and other media. Theorising Literary Islands argues that the ubiquity of island landscapes within the popular imagination belies certain ideological and cultural anxieties, and posits that the emergence of a Western popular culture tradition can largely be traced through the development of the Robinsonade genre, and through early European and American fascination with the Pacific region.
Isn't it Ironic?
This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular culture needs to come under greater scrutiny, it focuses on the many uses, abuses, and misunderstandings of irony in contemporary popular culture, and explores the troubling political populism at the heart of many supposedly satirical and (apparently) non-satirical texts. In an environment in which irony is frequently claimed as a defence for material and behaviour judged controversial, how do we, a...
On the Very Edge
On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff’s Fiction uses the life and work of bisexual, biracial, and bicultural author Michelle Cliff (1946–2016) to develop an entirely new approach to intersectional cultural, race, and gender/sexuality studies that prioritizes “bi-ness” as a methodological tool. The book focuses not “simply” on bisexuality, biracialism, or biculturalism as isolated identity concepts; rather, it explores the very nature of these intersectional identity categories as configured by Cliff. The text, therefore, represents a reclamation of bi identity in Cliff’s work as a much broader cultural, and not just sexual or racial, category, arguing that Cliff’s s...
