Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture


Book Description

Investigating modern art, literature, theory and the law, this book illustrates the different ways in which sex, gender and time intersect. It demonstrates that time offers new critical perspectives on sex and gender and makes problematic reductive understandings of sexual identity as well as straight and queer time




Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction


Book Description

Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of ‘exceptionality’ as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.




The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction


Book Description

An overview of popular literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day from a historical and comparative perspective.




In a Queer Time and Place


Book Description

The first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’ especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture. In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don’t Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the “transgender gaze,” as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities. Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.




Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture


Book Description

A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world. The training and use of memory was crucial in medieval culture, given the limited literacy at the time, but to date, very little thought has been given to the complex and disparate ways in which the theory and practices of memoryinteracted with the inherently unstable concepts of time and gender at the time. The essays in this volume, drawing on approaches from applied poststructural and queer theory among others, reassess those ideologies, meanings and responses generated by the workings of memory within and over "time". Ultimately, they argue for the inherent instability of the traditional gender-time-memory matrix (within which men are configured as the recorders of "history"and women as the repositories of a more inchoate familial and communal knowledge), showing the Middle Ages as a locus for a far more fluid conceptualization of time and memory than has previously been considered. Elizabeth Cox is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; Roberta Magnani is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University; Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Contributors: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Ayoush Lazikani, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Pamela E. Morgan, William Rogers, Patricia Skinner, Victoria Turner.




Sexual Anarchy


Book Description

'Sexual anarchy' - dire predictions, disasters, apocalypse - became the hallmark of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The New Woman and the Odd Woman threatened male identity and self-esteem; teh emergence of feminism and homosexuality meant the redefining of masculinity and femininity. This is the terrain which Elaine Showalter explores with such consummate originality and wit. Looking at parallels between the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries and their representations in literature, art and film, she ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture - from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies (Heart of Darkness reworked into Apocalypse Now), Freud to Fatal Attraction - all are part of this scholarly and entertaining study of the fin de siecle.




Prudence


Book Description

From NYT bestselling author Gail Carriger comes a witty adventure about a young woman with rare supernatural abilities travels to India for a spot of tea and adventure and finds she's bitten off more than she can chew. When Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama ("Rue" to her friends) is bequeathed an unexpected dirigible, she does what any sensible female under similar circumstances would do -- she christens it the Spotted Custard and floats off to India. Soon, she stumbles upon a plot involving local dissidents, a kidnapped brigadier's wife, and some awfully familiar Scottish werewolves. Faced with a dire crisis (and an embarrassing lack of bloomers), Rue must rely on her good breeding -- and her metanatural abilities -- to get to the bottom of it all. . .




Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes


Book Description

Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes examines how sexiness, sexuality and revisited sexual politics are used to modernize film and TV remakes. This exploration provides insight into the ever-evolving—and ever-contested—role of sex in society, and scrutinizes the politics and economics underpinning modern media reproduction. More nudity, kinky sex, and queer content are increasingly deployed in remakes to attract, and to titillate, a new generation of viewers. While sex in this book refers to increased erotic content, this discussion also incorporates an investigation of other uses of sex and gender to help a remake appear woke and abreast of the zeitgeist including feminist reimaginings and ‘girl power’ make-overs, updated gender roles, female cast-swaps, queer retellings, and repositioned gazes. Though increased sex is often considered a sign of modernity, gratuitous displays of female nudity can sometimes be interpreted as sexist and anachronistic, in turn highlighting that progressiveness around sexuality in contemporary media is not a linear story. Also examined therefore, are remakes that reduce the sexual content to appear cutting-edge and cognizant of the demands of today’s audiences.




The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature


Book Description

In this book, leading international scholars explore the major ideas and debates that have made the study of modernist literature one of the most vibrant areas of literary studies today. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to current research in the field, covering topics including: · The modernist everyday: emotion, myth, geographies and language scepticism · Modernist literature and the arts: music, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture · Textual and archival approaches: manuscripts, genetic criticism and modernist magazines · Modernist literature and science: sexology, neurology, psychology, technology and the theory of relativity · The geopolitics of modernism: globalization, politics and economics · Resources: keywords and an annotated bibliography




Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts


Book Description

9/11 is not simple a date on the calendar but marks a distinct historical threshold, ushering in the war on terror, various states of emergency, a supposed “clash of civilizations,” and the putative legitimation of counter-democratic procedures ranging from extraordinary renditions to enhanced interrogation. Perhaps no date, since Virginia Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” has marked such a singular point in the perception of time, identity and nature. Women’s writing has always been something of a counter-canon, offering modes of voice and point of view beyond that of the “man” of reason. This collection of essays explores the two problems of what it means to write as a woman and what it means to write in the twenty-first century.