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This book explores the reception of the medieval Irish tradition of fantastic journey tales in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Umberto Eco's Baudolino, and the science fiction television franchises Star Trek and Stargate. In doing so, the book opens the door to a new history of literary reception, using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval texts. It aims to show that there is a family of texts produced in the post-medieval period that are heirs of the medieval Irish literary tradition of fantastic voyage narratives and that using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval works can open up new perspectives in our understanding of these works.
After more than 55 years of transmedia storytelling, 'Star Trek' is a global phenomenon that has never been more successful than it is today. 'Star Trek' fandom is worldwide, time tested, and growing, and academic interest in the franchise, both inside and outside of the classroom, is high; at the moment, more 'Star Trek' works are underway or in development simultaneously than at any other moment in history. Unlike works that focus on a limited number of stories/media in this franchise or only offer one expert’s or discipline’s insights, this accessible and multidisciplinary anthology includes analyses from a wide range of scholars and explores 'Star Trek' from its debut in 1966 to its current incarnations, considers its implications for and collaborations with fandom, and trace its ideas and meanings across series, media, and time. 'Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier' will undoubtedly speak to academics in the field, students in the classroom, and informed lay readers and fans.
As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide ran...
American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays off...
Future Spaces of Power explores political, cultural, and societal narratives of future space(s) on a global scale to complicate the cultural logic of systemic futures that exist outside the boundaries of dominant political imaginaries. Contributors critically engage with alternative visions found in literature, film, and other cultural artifacts that encourage us to either live with or escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late capitalism and consider what these alternative visions might do – or fail to do – in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. Through these analyses, the volume collectively argues that anti-pos...
Contributions by Lawrence Abrams, Dorian L. Alexander, Max Bledstein, Peter Cullen Bryan, Stephen Connor, Matthew J. Costello, Martin Flanagan, Michael Fuchs, Michael Goodrum, Bridget Keown, Kaleb Knoblach, Christina M. Knopf, Martin Lund, Jordan Newton, Stefan Rabitsch, Maryanne Rhett, and Philip Smith History has always been a matter of arranging evidence into a narrative, but the public debate over the meanings we attach to a given history can seem particularly acute in our current age. Like all artistic mediums, comics possess the power to mold history into shapes that serve its prospective audience and creator both. It makes sense, then, that history, no stranger to the creation of hagi...
Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem’s Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid g...
"This text explores the social, cultural and historical contexts of paper money. Predicated on the assumption that paper bills speak to us through the use of symbols--letters, verbal and visual elements, as well as symbols of civic values--this book examines what has been conveyed to Americans via their currency from Colonial times through the present day"--Provided by publisher.
The study is an interdisciplinary analysis of American culture through one central case study. It explores the cultural, social, and historic contexts of America's national money icon, covering such topics as origin, design, creative usages, counterfeiting, and its defenses by official America. Applying the theoretical model of a "circuit of culture," the book attempts a comprehensive account of the ways in which dollar bills relate to social and political change, and how such events as the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the continuing War on Terror have shaped the themes of national and other identities. The book should offer graduate students and scholars alike an opportunity to explore the meanings and hidden agendas of the world's most powerful and most widely known as well as most widely used currency. In addition, it should make it possible to look at other currencies and forms of money in a similar way, much as it should help to refine and expand theoretically the analytic approach outlined in it.
Clear all moorings, one-half impulse power and set course for a mare incognitum... A popular culture artifact of the New Frontier/Space Race era, Star Trek is often mistakenly viewed as a Space Western. However, the Western format is not what governs the worldbuilding of Star Trek, which was, after all, also pitched as "Hornblower in space." Star Trek is modeled on the world of the "British Golden Age of Sail" as it is commonly found in the genre of sea fiction. This book re-historicizes and remaps the origins of the franchise and subsequently the entirety of its fictional world--the Star Trek continuum--on an as yet uncharted transatlantic bearing.