The rapid development of the TV series in the twenty-first century has resulted in an emergence of new aesthetic, cultural, and social trends. The development has influenced both the mainstream of popular culture and reception practices of audiences across nations and platforms. This book observes how the means employed in key contemporary TV series texts and a specific thematic variety have promoted new reception styles and redefined conventional interpretive practices. The authors analyze a variety of series released since 2000 to discuss historical (dis)continuities of genres and conventions, and observe how interpretive competences promoted by the rhetoric of contemporary TV series result from, and are polemical with, the conventions of visual and verbal cultures of preceding decades.

This formalist-narratological study of T.F. Powys' and V.S. Pritchett's short fiction reestablishes both authors as important contributors to the history of the short story form. It also discusses how writers, who did not belong to the modernist avant-garde innovation, address the problems of the short story form in the twentieth century. The study takes a close look at the uses of the ordinary and analyses character, setting, and event presentation, narrators, audiences, narrativity, eventfulness, causality, and narrative rhetoric. It presents two kinds of short fiction and two kinds of the ordinary: the ecstatic one, focused on violations of norm, and the static kind that reassures its patterns.