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Over the past decade, Korean popular culture has become a global phenomenon. The "Korean Wave" of music, film, television, sports, and cuisine generates significant revenues and cultural pride in South Korea. The Korean Popular Culture Reader provides a timely and essential foundation for the study of "K-pop," relating the contemporary cultural landscape to its historical roots. The essays in this collection reveal the intimate connections of Korean popular culture, or hallyu, to the peninsula's colonial and postcolonial histories, to the nationalist projects of the military dictatorship, and to the neoliberalism of twenty-first-century South Korea. Combining translations of seminal essays b...
The Culture of 'The Culture' is the first critical monograph focussed solely on Iain M. Banks's 'Culture' series, exploring his political, philosophical and literary thought, and arguing that the Culture is both a harmonious, socialist alternative form of globalisation and a critique of our neo-liberal present.
In Feels Right Kemi Adeyemi presents an ethnography of how black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Adeyemi stages the book in queer dance parties in gentrifying neighborhoods, where good feelings are good business. But feeling good is elusive for black queer women whose nightlives are undercut by white people, heterosexuality, neoliberal capitalism, burnout, and other buzzkills. Adeyemi documents how black queer women respond to these conditions: how they destroy DJ booths, argue with one another, dance slowly, and stop partying altogether. Their practices complicate our expectations that life at night, on the queer dance floor, or am...
This collection of essays seeks to expand and refine the study of Sinophone and Franco-Japanese transnational cinema. Chapter by chapter, each author writes about two or three transnational films (and the characters within those films) that highlight issues related to migration, exile, and imprisonment. The essays are connected by themes of displacement, liminality, and (mis)communication. Overall, this anthology seeks to demonstrate that in-depth cinematic analysis is key to understanding filmic representations of diasporic and displaced communities in modern Mainland China and Japan.
An essay collection that significantly expands previous scholarly writing on award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold, arguing for the significant contributions her works make to feminist and queer thought, disability studies and fan studies.
This volume on Star Trek: Discovery brings together eighteen essays and one interview from a variety of disciplines including cultural and media studies, literary studies, history and political science. The essays examine the narratives and production history of the new series while situating it within the larger Star Trek franchise.
Creative Writing Analysis is a guide to solving creative writing problems; acting as a practical introduction to progressing a creative writing project as well as an exploration of the many ways in which creative writing can be understood. Through chapters on topics including writing methods, textual analysis, practice-led research, interdisciplinarity, and cultural contexts, this book explores the various forms of analysis that can be employed. Graeme Harper provides information to assist in creative decision making, and as a means for discussing approaches and outcomes in creative writing. The book also includes an Afterword by Dianne Donnelly, whose work in Creative Writing Studies has been widely recognized as a contribution to the critical examination of creative writing. Whether you are a creative writer seeking to improve your work or you are simply interested in analysing the practice and outcomes of others doing creative writing, Creative Writing Analysis offers strategies to assist students and practitioners of creative writing and literary studies.
Fantasy literature inhabits the realms of the orthodox and heterodox, the divine and demonic simultaneously, making it uniquely positioned to imaginatively re-envision Christian theology from a position of difference. Having an affinity for the monstrous and the 'other', and a preoccupation with desires and forms of embodiment that subvert dominant understandings of reality, fantasy texts hold hitherto unexplored potential for articulating queer and feminist religious perspectives. Focusing primarily on fantastic literature of the mid- to late twentieth century, this book examines how Christian theology in the genre is dismantled, re-imagined and transformed from the margins of gender and se...
At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.
This book investigates a paradox of creative yet scripted play—how LEGO invites players to build ‘freely’ with and within its highly structured, ideologically-laden toy system. First, this book considers theories and methods for deconstructing LEGO as a medium of bricolage, the creative reassembly of already-significant elements. Then, it pieces together readings of numerous LEGO sets, advertisements, videogames, films, and other media that show how LEGO constructs five ideologies of play: construction play, dramatic play, digital play, transmedia play, and attachment play. From suburban traffic patterns to architectural croissants, from feminized mini-doll bodies to toys-to-life stories, from virtual construction to playful fan creations, this book explores how the LEGO medium conveys ideological messages—not by transmitting clear statements but by providing implicit instructions for how to reassemble meanings it had all along.