Results by title

Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

How the study of Shakespeare’s legacy, specifically in film and television, can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean

In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as “faithful” or “unfaithful” to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin challenges these critical orthodoxies. Instead, recognizing how a film or television series closely recalls Shakespeare’s drama encourages an interrogation of what we consider to be “Shakespeare” in the first place.

Drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s model of the uncanny—the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity—this book focuses on films and television series that were not marketed as adaptations of Shakespeare. Yet these works unexpectedly invoke lost, even troubling aspects of Shakespeare’s original playtexts, their performance history, or their reception. Broadening the scope of fidelity readings beyond familiar concerns like plot and language, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare’s afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Engaging contemporary debates in literary and psychoanalytic theory, this book features provocative close readings of The Tempest, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale alongside recent films and television series, from art-house movies such as The Master and Manchester by the Sea to the cult favorites Brigsby Bear and Vice Principals. These works conjure widely overlooked qualities of Shakespeare’s drama by recalling the casting practices or the generic contexts of the early modern stage or by making a meaningful intervention in the plays’ critical reception. Closely examining these surprisingly faithful adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama helps us to articulate the original experience of the early modern stage and better consider its resonance in the present.

This book will benefit students and scholars of Shakespeare on film and psychoanalytic theory. Yet Uncanny Fidelity will also be of interest to scholars of performance history, source studies, and early modern discourses of race and gender—as well as anyone interested in the unexpected connections between canonical literature and contemporary culture. By examining adaptation as an instance of uncanny return, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare’s afterlife can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean.

How the zombie represents capitalism’s fantasy of limitless labor

Much more than just an enduring figure of horror entertainment, the zombie is a uniquely modern symbol representing capitalism’s most brutal demands on human life. Examining the push to extract surplus value from human bodies in ways that exceed their natural limits, David Bering-Porter shows how this notion of the undead is both integral to and symptomatic of capitalism’s endless cycle of growth and consumption.

Bering-Porter demonstrates how the zombie has long been deeply intertwined with issues of race and exploitation, from its origins in the slave plantations of colonial Haiti to its traces in the continuing evolution of artificial intelligence systems, serving as capitalism’s ideal worker: one that never rests, never stops, and never dies. Featuring close readings of Marx alongside films such as I Walked with a Zombie, The Blob, and Night of the Living Dead, the book traces the concept of undead labor as it manifests across various historical epochs, providing insight into the manifold ways that capitalism has sought to transform living beings into instruments of limitless production.

As he weaves together critical race studies with an analysis of popular culture and media, Bering-Porter interrogates racialized capitalism and its fantasy of labor beyond all limits. By highlighting how the zombie is borne of the same ideology that has given rise to contemporary burnout culture and environmental collapse, Undead Labor uncovers the capitalist system’s relentless death drive with the hope that it finally may be put to rest.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin.

The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘Underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture.

The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht).

Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity. 

Indian movies are among the most popular in the world. However, despite increased availability and study, these films remain misunderstood and underappreciated in much of the English-speaking world, in part for cultural reasons.

In this book, Patrick Colm Hogan sets out through close analysis and explication of culturally particular information about Indian history, Hindu metaphysics, Islamic spirituality, Sanskrit aesthetics, and other Indian traditions to provide necessary cultural contexts for understanding Indian films. Hogan analyzes eleven important films, using them as the focus to explore the topics of plot, theme, emotion, sound, and visual style in Indian cinema. These films draw on a wide range of South Asian cultural traditions and are representative of the greater whole of Indian cinema. By learning to interpret these examples with the tools Hogan provides, the reader will be able to take these skills and apply them to other Indian films.

But this study is not simply culturalist. Hogan also takes up key principles from cognitive neuroscience to illustrate that all cultures share perceptual, cognitive, and emotional elements that, when properly interpreted, can help to bridge gaps between seemingly disparate societies. Hogan locates the specificity of Indian culture in relation to human universals, and illustrates this cultural-cognitive synthesis through his detailed interpretations of these films. This book will help both scholars and general readers to better understand and appreciate Indian cinema.

Often dismissed as escapism, screen musicals of the 1960s in fact tapped into unspoken sadness about an America that was slipping away. Jake Johnson delves into film and television musicals of the era to examine their place in networks of grieving in America, for America, and about America.

The Golden Age of musical theater ended just as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying debuted, and Johnson uses Kübler-Ross’s five stages to frame the intertwining of musicals and grief. He analyzes films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and State Fair alongside paintings, poetry, and other images and texts to reveal how the musical theater engine built in the first half of the century broke down just as a new language emerged to describe the melancholy felt by people facing the end of the world they had known.

Nuanced and original, Unstaged Grief plumbs the grief, loss, and hope behind the Technicolor spectacle and rousing showstoppers.