Tracing the "American Guerrilla" narrative through more than one hundred years of film and television, this book shows how the conventions and politics of this narrative influence Americans to see themselves as warriors, both on screen and in history. American guerrillas fight small-scale battles that, despite their implications for large-scale American victories, often go untold. This book evaluates those stories to illumine the ways in which film and television have created, reinforced, and circulated an "American Guerrilla" fantasy—a mythic narrative in which Americans, despite having the most powerful military in history, are presented as underdog resistance fighters against an overwhelming and superior occupying evil. Unconventional Warriors: The Fantasy of the American Resistance Fighter in Television and Film explains that this fantasy has occupied the center of numerous war films and in turn shaped the way in which Americans see those wars and themselves. Informed by the author's expertise on war in contemporary literature and popular culture, this book begins with an introduction that outlines the basics of the "American Guerrilla" narrative and identifies it as a recurring theme in American war films. Subsequent chapters cover one hundred years of American "guerrillas" in film and television. The book concludes with a chapter on science fiction narratives, illustrating how the conventions and politics of these stories shape even the representation of wholly fictional, imagined wars on screen.

Classical Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, formed the sum and substance of Shakespeare’s education and was the basis of his understanding of the power of language and how it worked to move, delight and teach. Rhetoric, which seeks to explain the way that language works to influence others, provides a powerful, transformative tool for approaching text in performance. This book helps you understand the key concepts of rhetoric. It gives clear explanations, stripped of jargon, and examples of rhetorical technique in the plays. It also provides engaging, practical exercises to unlock character and to identify themes in the plays through the lens of rhetoric. Academically rigorous, based on more than a decade of practical experience in the use of rhetoric in drama at the highest level, it is an ideal companion for anyone engaging with Shakespeare in performance.

The first of its kind, this companion to British-Jewish theatre brings a neglected dimension in the work of many prominent British theatre-makers to the fore. Its structure reflects the historical development of British-Jewish theatre from the 1950s onwards, beginning with an analysis of the first generation of writers that now forms the core of post-war British drama (including Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker) and moving on to significant thematic force-fields and faultlines such as the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel/Palestine. The book also covers the new generation of British-Jewish playwrights, with a special emphasis on the contribution of women writers and the role of particular theatres in the development of British-Jewish theatre, as well as TV drama. Included in the book are fascinating interviews with a set of significant theatre practitioners working today, including Ryan Craig, Patrick Marber, John Nathan, Julia Pascal and Nicholas Hytner. The companion addresses, not only aesthetic and ideological concerns, but also recent transformations with regard to institutional contexts and frameworks of cultural policies.

In Performative Memoir: Moving between Worlds, Theresa Carilli and Adrienne Viramontes construct a new genre of writing, performative memoir. Drawing on scholarship in performance studies and autoethnography, the authors outline a methodology for studying autoethnography, performance, and memoir in a new creative process. Carilli and Viramontes then demonstrate the process by creating their own performative memoirs, titled "Loving Crazy" and "Mexican Love," and perform a close reading of each memoir to show how these theories can be applied to our own personal experiences and trauma. Scholars of performance studies, communication, media studies, cultural studies, and trauma studies will find this book particularly useful.

The first anthology of youth plays from Gaza and the wider Palestinian region, this timely collection ties together nineteen plays produced by Theatre Day Productions, one of the foremost community theatres in the Middle East. Written by playwright Jackie Lubeck, this collection responds to the siege on Gaza and the Israeli military operations from 2009 to 2014, reflecting how Gazan youth deal with trauma, loss and urban destruction. In the nineteen plays within this anthology, the reader and theatrical producer witnesses experiences of a forgotten youth, besieged by a silent international community and a brutal wall. The plays are arranged into five different thematic series, which include family entanglements, loss and the fundamental goodness and resourcefulness of human beings.

For centuries, humankind has sought to know itself through an understanding of the body, in sickness and in health, inside and out. This fascination left in its wake a rich body of artworks that demonstrate not only the facts of the human body, but also the ways in which our ideas about the body and its proper representation have changed over time. At times both beautiful and repulsive, illustrated anatomy continues to hold our interest today, and is frequently referenced in popular culture. Anatomica brings together some of the most striking, fascinating and bizarre artworks from the 16th through to the 20th century, exploring human anatomy in one beautiful volume.

The first monograph on the work of celebrated and influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu Wangechi Mutu's remarkable body of work touches on such issues as sexuality, ecology, politics, and the rhythms and chaos that govern the world. Her paintings, sculptures, and collages, often enriched with culturally-charged materials including tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers, and sand, interweave fact with fiction, generating a unique form of myth-making that sets her apart from classical history or popular culture. This is the first book to document her evolution and explore her impact.

From the author of dozens of #1 New York Times bestsellers and the creator of many unforgettable movies comes a vivid, intelligent, and nostalgic journey through three decades of horror as experienced through the eyes of the most popular writer in the genre. In 1981, years before he sat down to tackle On Writing, Stephen King decided to address the topic of what makes horror horrifying and what makes terror terrifying. Here, in ten brilliantly written chapters, King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre--from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.
With the insight and good humor his fans appreciated in "On ?Writing," "Danse Macabre" is an enjoyably entertaining tour through Stephen King's beloved world of horror.

A moving biography – told in vivid pictures. In five chapters, Philipp Deines traces stages in the life of the now world-famous Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. The personal and artistic development of this pioneer of abstraction is illuminated here. In this book, readers discover how the artist worked, lived, and loved, and what influenced her: from the great scientific upheavals to family history, anthroposophy, and spiritualist séances. In the depiction of her spiritual experiences, Deines’ visual language is influenced by Klint’s fantastic pictorial worlds. Julia Voss, author of the first comprehensive biography of the artist in 2020, was closely involved in the creation of this graphic novel. Biography, art history, and contemporary narrative style merge and complement each other in these magnificent visual worlds.

The richly illustrated volume features 33 short essays, each taking a single object as a starting point to unravel complex, interconnected histories. Written by curators, scientists, conservators and other museum staff, this multifaceted work explores issues of the circulation of materials, objects and technology which have long predated the contemporary period. This approach encourages readers to appreciate well known masterpieces as well as lesser known and unpublished works from a new perspective and focus on networks of artistic, cultural and historical connections that shaped their meaning and significance. This publication is a thought-provoking, engaging and accessible volume that will appeal to those with an interest in the arts of Asia, from Turkey to Japan and in all media, as well as those readers with an appreciation for late nineteenth-century American art.

Simon Stephens is one of Europe’s pre-eminent living playwrights. Since the beginning of his career in 1998, Stephens’s award-winning plays have been translated into over twenty languages, been produced on four continents, and continue to feature prominently in the repertoires of European theatre. His original works have garnered numerous awards, with his stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning seven Olivier Awards and enjoying acclaim on Broadway. In the first book to provide a critical account of Stephens’s work, Jacqueline Bolton draws upon the playwright’s unpublished personal archives, as well as original interviews with directors and actors, to advance detailed analyses of his original plays and their productions, examine contemporary approaches to playwriting, and deliver insights into broader debates regarding text, performance and authorship. Caridad Svich addresses Stephens’s theatrical output between 2014 and 2019, and essays from Mireia Aragay and James Hudson provide additional perspectives on international productions and the playwright’s adaptive practices. Andrew Haydon’s edited interviews with six of Stephens’s key collaborators – Marianne Elliott, Sarah Frankcom, Sean Holmes, Ramin Gray, Katie Mitchell and Carrie Cracknell – further illuminate the work from a director’s viewpoint. The Theatre of Simon Stephens situates the playwright’s oeuvre within his embrace of aesthetics and working relations encountered in European theatre cultures, focusing in particular upon shifting attitudes towards the function of the playwright, the relationship between playwrights and directors, and the role of the audience in live performance. The Companion serves as a lively and engaging study of one of the most restlessly creative and important dramatists of our generation.

Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.

For many readers, the Irish and the fantastic are synonymous. From the ancient texts and medieval illuminated manuscripts to 20th century poetry, painting, drama, stories, and novels, Irish writers and artists have found the fantastic not only congenial but necessary to their art. In his introduction to this collection of fifteen essays that focus on the fantastic in Irish literature and the arts, Donald E. Morse contends that the use of the fantastic mode has allowed Irish writers and artists to express ideas, emotions, and insights not available through the direct imitation of everyday reality. Morse argues that for the Irish, the road to insight was often through the territory of the marvelous and the fantastic rather than through literalism, rationalism, or logic. In seeking to arrive at a definition of what constitutes the fantastic, Morse looks at work by Sean O'Casey and Seamus Heaney and finds that the fantastic occurs during encounters with what is considered to be the impossible, a concept contingent upon personal beliefs. To demonstrate how the fantastic may yield new insights into human beings, their behavior, feelings, and thoughts, as well as lead to innovations in art, Morse scrutinizes Circe from James Joyce's Ulysses, probably the most famous use of the fantastic in all modern Irish literature. The works of Yeats, Field, Shelly, Synge, Beckett, Swift, Coleridge, and others are examined in incisive chapters written from the point of view of the fantastic. The four-part study begins with a section on Ancient Knowledge and the Fantastic in which four chapters discuss Yeats's plays; The Figure of the Mermaid in Irish Legend and Poetry; Ghosts in Irish Drama; and The Only Jealousy of Emer. In a section devoted to Irish theatre, music, and painting, the paintings of Jack B. Yeats are examined for fantastic content and Peter Egri finds parallels between the work of John Field and Chopin, Shelly, and Turner. The plays of Synge, O'Casey, Beckett, and Thomas Murphy are the subject of Part III. The final section considers The Occult, Fantasy, and Phantasmagoria in Swift, Dunsany, Joyce, and Yeats. The coeditors' afterword, Looking Backward, Looking Ahead, concludes the volume which also contains a select bibliography on the fantastic. Generalists in literature or the arts, students and scholars of Irish Studies and the fantastic in the arts, as well as those enamored of things Irish will find this collection resonant with rich insights into the genre.

Title to be released in October 2021 by Headline Publishing

More than any other event of the 1930s, the migration of thousands of jobless and dispossessed Americans from the Dust Bowl states to the "promised land" of California evokes the hardships and despair of the Great Depression. In this innovative new study, Charles Shindo shows how the public memory of that migration has been dominated not by academic historians but by a handful of artists and would-be reformers.

Shindo examines the images of Dust Bowl migrants in photography, fiction, film, and song and marks off the various distances between these representations and the realities of migrant lives. He shows how photographer Dorothea Lange, novelist John Steinbeck, Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, and folksinger Woody Guthrie, as well as folklorists and government reformers, sympathized with the migrants' plight but also appropriated that experience to further their own aesthetic and ideological agendas.

The haunted look of Lange's "Migrant Mother" and other photos, the powerful story of the Joad family in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Ford's poetic cinematic adaptation of that novel, and the gritty plainfolk lyrics of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads have all combined to portray the migrants as the quintessential victims of the Great Depression. Shindo, however, contends that these artists failed to fully grasp the realities of "Okie" culture and seemed far more concerned with promoting views and agendas that the migrants themselves might have found inaccurate or unappealing.

Shindo's study shows us how art can dominate history in the popular mind and illuminates the ways in which artists blend aesthetics and politics to make a personal statement about the human condition. His book not only increases our understanding of a tragic era in American history but also expands the scope of current histories of the American West to include cultural representations and their importance.

Black women’s work in television has been, since the beginning, a negotiation. Black Women and the Changing Television Landscape explores the steps black women, as actors, directors, and producers, have taken to improve representations of black people on the small screen. Beginning with The Beulah Show, Anderson articulates the interrelationship between US culture and the televisual, demonstrating the conditions under which black women particularly, and black people generally, exist in popular culture.

An unprecedented close textual analysis of numerous films within their contemporary cultural context. This book engages with representations of social crisis in Argentine fictional cinema between 1998 and 2005, a period when Argentina experienced a deep economic crisis that brought about significant changes in politics, culture, society and the arts. It focuses on the ways in which cinema interpreted and represented both contemporary and long-established issues within national and social discourse, while re-assessing notions of national identity, culture and class. Despite a growing body of scholarship on Argentine film published in English over the past few years, the role of more conventional films aimed at the public at large remains underexplored. By combining close textual analysis of films with the study of their cultural context, this book argues that fictional cinema at large addressed predominantly middle-class audiences, offering both reflective and divergent views on social reality that enriched the cultural arena in which Argentineans could reflect on their past, their daily life, and their relationship with the other. In this sense cinema helped Argentine people to learn to live in democracy.

This magnificent publication surveys the vital role of women in the development of Abstract Expressionism by looking at more than 50 paintings, collages and sculptures all accompanied by carefully selected quotes from the artists themselves. The dominant movement of the New York and San Francisco art scenes of the mid-20th century, Abstract Expressionism is celebrated as the first development in American art to gain international status. The movement is synonymous with the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, but also belonging to this generation who changed the course of modern art were numerous female artists; only in recent years have their contributions received the recognition they deserve. The remarkable women in this exciting new book - among them Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell - studied at the same art schools as the men, exhibited at the same galleries, and were part of the same social scene. But their work was not shown and reviewed as widely or considered as valuable as that of the men. This beautiful book presents the works of the Levett Collection, an unparalleled private collection of paintings, drawings and sculpture by women Abstract Expressionists. Richly illustrated essays by the scholars Ellen G. Landau and Joan M. Marter, leading authorities on the subject, consider, respectively, the vital role of women in the development of Abstract Expressionism and the work of women sculptors of the movement. Full of exuberant, explosive colour and densely layered expression, the main part of the book is devoted to more than 50 paintings, collages, and sculptures, all accompanied by pertinent quotes from the women about their artistic practice and concerns. An illustrated timeline and 35 artist biographies provide further insight, making this volume an essential addition to the study of Abstract Expressionist women, innovators in their own right, whose time in the art-historical spotlight has finally come. AUTHOR: Ellen G. Landau is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emerita at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Joan M. Marter is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 170 illustrations

One of the most dynamic figures of the entertainment industry, Fred Astaire's career spanned most of the twentieth century. For some, he brings to mind the world of Broadway. For others, he represents the golden age of the movie musical, particularly because of his eleven-film collaboration with Ginger Rogers. Virtually all of his fans will long remember his effortlessly graceful dance routines. International dance giants have credited his work with inspiring their careers and giving them a model of excellence. His innovations as a choreographer, dance director, and creator of musical sequences forever changed the presentation of dance on film. Though he was always in the public spotlight, he treasured his family and cherished his privacy. For a star of such stature, he was remarkably free from scandal. This reference book is a complete guide to his life and career. The volume begins with a biography that traces his life from his birth in Omaha in 1899, to his professional debut in 1905, to his Broadway and Hollywood careers, to his death in 1987. A chronology then highlights the chief events of his life. The chapters that follow provide detailed information for his work on stage, film, radio, and television. Each chapter includes entries for individual performances, with entries providing cast and credit information, plot synopses, critical commentary, and excerpts from reviews. The volume also lists his recordings, unfulfilled projects, and other information. An extensive annotated bibliography concludes the work.

A fun, opinionated, illustrated look at Westerns—with great photographs from great movies This unique compendium of short essays about, and evocative photos from, the 100 greatest Western movies of all time is the authoritative new resource on the subject—and the ideal illustrated gift book for all cowboy enthusiasts and cinema fans. Beyond being eminently browseable and lavishly illustrated, the book—compiled by the editors of the popular Western magazine American Cowboy—is sure to generate hot debate over its “top 100” list, and it covers plenty of movies that appeal to a wide variety of ages and tastes—from The Ox-Bow Incident, High Noon, and Shane to The Wild Bunch, High Plains Drifter, and Unforgiven. Each essay makes the case for why the selected movie belongs in the top 100—and included are five movies you've never heard of but should immediately put high on your list. The introduction sets forth the criteria for the selections while also presenting a short history of the genre.

Over the course of seven years and 180 episodes, The Golden Girls altered the television landscape. For the first time in history, Americans (and, later, the rest of the world) were watching sexagenarians—and one octogenarian—leading active, vital lives. These were older women who had careers, families, lovers, and adventures, far from the matronly television characters of the past. In The Golden Girls: A Cultural History, Bernadette Giacomazzo shows why this iconic sitcom is more than just comedy gold. She examines how, between all the laughs and the tales of St. Olaf, these women tackled tough issues of the time—issues that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. From sexual harassment, ageism, and PTSD to AIDS, inter-racial relationships, and homosexuality, Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia weren’t afraid to take on topics which were once considered taboo. This first-ever cultural history of The Golden Girls explores how the show forever changed the world’s perception of what it means to grow older, and showed us the healing power of friendship, community, and sisterhood. It gave the voiceless a new voice and unveiled all the possibilities of what “family” can mean—no matter one’s race, religion, creed, or sexual orientation.