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The 21st century sustains one significant commonality with the decades of the preceding century. The majority of individuals parenting on their own and heading one-parent families continue to be mothers. Even so, current trends in globalization (economic, political, cultural) along with technological advancement, shifts in political, economic and social policy, contemporary demographic shifts, changing trends in the labor sector linked to global economics, and developments in legislative and judicial output, all signify the distinctiveness of the current moment with regard to family patterns and social norms. Seeking to contribute to an existing body of literature focused on single motherhood and lone parenting in the 20th century, this collection explores and illuminates a more recent landscape of 21st century debates, policies and experiences surrounding single motherhood and one-parent headed families.
This book is about the fiercely contrasting visions of two of the nineteenth century’s greatest utopian writers. A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study, it emphasizes that space is a key factor in utopian fiction, often a barometer of mankind’s successful relationship with nature, or an indicator of danger. Emerging and critically acclaimed scholars consider the legacy of two great utopian writers, exploring their use of space and time in the creation of sites in which contemporary social concerns are investigated and reordered. A variety of locations is featured, including Morris’s quasi-fourteenth century London, the lush and corrupted island, a routed and massacred English countryside, the high-rises of the future and the vertiginous landscape of another Earth beyond the stars.
Serial storytelling has the advantage of unlocking rather than simplifying the complexities of digital culture. With their worldbuilding potential, TV series open up new artistic horizons, particularly for the dystopian genre. Situated at the nexus of dystopia, complex TV, and a metamodern cultural logic, Dystopia on Demand: Technology, Digital Culture, and the Metamodern Quest in Complex Serial Dystopias offers readers novel insights into the dynamics of serial dystopias in the contemporary streaming landscape. Introducing the term 'complex serial dystopias' to describe series that allow audiences to engage with the dystopian premise from multiple angles, the book examines four Anglo-American series, including Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Westworld, and Kiss Me First. The in-depth analyses trace the variety of ways in which these series offer critical reflections on the human-technology entanglement in digital culture.
This book examines the types, discourse modes, and effects of sex jokes in different African contexts, in a range of different cultural forms, from the internet to music, books, films, advertising, and images, thus filling the existing void in literature on the subject. Arguing that sex jokes are used to perform a number of functions in African society, the contributors show how they can be used to perpetuate violence against women, construct spaces, resist oppression, create conformity, build affiliations, and subvert morality. They consider jokes from Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zambia in a range of forms including queer sex jokes, rape jokes, performed sex jokes, gendered humour, and resistance sex humour. The book places particular emphasis on the impact of new media platforms and the anonymity they provide. Providing an important analysis of this tabooed but culturally important facet of everyday life, this book will be of interest to scholars of African culture and society from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, gender studies, literary studies, and sociology.
The volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how 21st-century British theatre increasingly intercuts dystopian and utopian elements to create innovative strategies for addressing current social and political concerns. In the case studies, a key role is given to the ways in which the selected plays use real and fictional spaces on stage and thereby manage to construct interactional spaces which the spectators are invited to share.
This book looks at the cultural, political and economic conditions of British Euroscepticism. Focusing on eight British dystopian novels, published in the years before the decisive In/Out-Referendum, and taking into account cultural, political and economic contexts, Lisa Bischoff shows how the novels’ stance towards the integration project range from slight criticism to outright hostility. The wide availability of the novels, and the prominence of both its authors and readers, among which are political figures David Cameron, Nigel Farage and Daniel Hannan, amplify the power of literary Euroscepticism. Drawing on cultural studies, literature and social science, British Novels and the European Union reveals the many facets of British Euroscepticism.
The childlike character of ideal femininity has long been critiqued by feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir. Yet, women continue to be represented as childlike in the western fashion media, despite the historical connotations of inferiority. This book questions why such images still hold appeal to contemporary women, after three, or even four, waves of feminism. Focusing on the period of 1990–2015, Picturing the Woman-Child traces the evolution of childlike femininity in British fashion magazines, including Vogue, i-D and Lula, Girl of my Dreams. These images draw upon a network of references, from Kinderwhore and Lolita to Alice in Wonderland and the femme-enfant of Surrealism. Alongside analysis of fashion photography, the book presents the findings of original research into audience reception. Inviting contemporary women to comment on images of the 'woman-child' provides an insight into the meaning of this figure as well as an evaluation of theory on the 'female gaze'. Both scholarly and accessible, the book paves the way for future studies on how readers make sense of fashion imagery.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class offers a comprehensive and fresh assessment of the cultural impact of class in literature, analyzing various innovative, interdisciplinary approaches of textual analysis and intersections of literature, including class subjectivities, mental health, gender and queer studies, critical race theory, quantitative and scientific methods, and transnational perspectives in literary analysis. Utilizing these new methods and interdisciplinary maps from field-defining essayists, students will become aware of ways to bring these elusive texts into their own writing as one of the parallel perspectives through which to view literature. This volume will provide students with an insight into the history of the intersections of class, theory of class and invisibility in literature, and new trends in exploring class in literature. These multidimensional approaches to literature will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students becoming familiar with class analysis, and will offer seasoned scholars the most significant critical approaches in class studies.
First published in 2003. With essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Dark Horizons focuses on the development of critical dystopia in science fiction at the end of the twentieth century. In these narratives of places more terrible than even the reality produced by the neo-conservative backlash of the 1980s and the neoliberal hegemony of the 1990s, utopian horizons stubbornly anticipate a different and more just world. The top-notch team of contributors explores this development in a variety of ways: by looking at questions of form, politics, the politics of form, and the form of politics. In a broader context, the essays connect their textual and theoretical analyses with historical developments such as September 11th, the rise and downturn of the global economy, and the growth of anti-capitalist movements.
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