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In 2002, Vertigo/DC Comics published the first issue of Bill
Willingham's Fables. The series imagined the lives of fairly tale
figures-Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Cinderella and the ubiquitous
Prince Charming, among many others-as they made new lives for
themselves in modern-day New York City, having fled their storied
homeworlds following an invasion. After 150 issues and many awards,
Fables concluded its run in July 2015. This collection of new
essays is the first study of the sprawling and complex series. The
contributors discuss such topics as Fables' status as a
contemporary adaptation of folk and fairy tales; its use of
conventional genres like sword-and-sorcery, crime and romance; its
portrayal of social and political relationships; and its
self-referential moments. Providing a detailed introduction to the
various themes and ideas in the series, this book explores how
Fables portrays redemption and the function of community, and how
our hopes and fears influence our ideal of ""happily ever after.
Catching the Torch examines contemporary novels and plays written
about Canada's participation in World War I. Exploring such works
as Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, Jack
Hodgins's Broken Ground, Kevin Kerr's Unity (1918), Stephen
Massicotte's Mary's Wedding, and Frances Itani's Deafening, the
book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that
the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War.In
contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to
regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian
myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical
bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure
up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic
difference, the ability to do one's duty without complaint or
arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical
courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of
war while making use of its productive cultural effects. Through a
close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration
of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch
argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national
identity, one that is articulated via the representation of
straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter
current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in
particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national
""character.
The short story and the short story cycle have long been considered
a marginal genre, free to make room for fresh or risk-taking
voices. But in thematizing masculinity in crisis, the genre uses
the premise of the marginal to elevate recuperative masculinity
politics and nostalgia for traditional patriarchy. Despite the
scholarly tendency to link marginal genres and marginalized voices,
features of the CanLit infrastructure - including genre criticism
and literary prize culture - are complicit in normalizing hegemonic
masculinity and the Settler colonial project. Bearers of Risk
examines how male Canadian writers mobilize the early
twenty-first-century short story cycle as an illustration of
post-9/11 recuperative masculinity politics, exposing the tendency
to position White, heteronormative men's viewpoints as objective.
Neta Gordon introduces the civil bearer of risk, a figure who
comprehends the position of men as being marked by or for failure,
and who reasserts masculine authority as civil duty towards
community. This book looks at contemporary experimental short story
cycles, debut cycles by ethnically minoritized and immigrant
writers, and cycles unified by setting, whether suburban, urban, or
rural. Bearers of Risk unsettles popular notions of the inherent
outsider status of the short story cycle while also scrutinizing
expressions of recuperative masculinity politics through which men
assert their right to reclaim the centre.
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