Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

This book charts an interdisciplinary narrative of literary pragmatism and creative democracy across the writings of African American women, from the works of nineteenth-century philosophers to the novels and short stories of Harlem Renaissance authors. The book argues that this critically neglected narrative forms a genealogy of black feminist intersectionality and a major contribution to the development of American pragmatism. Bringing together the philosophical writings of Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell and the fictional works of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, this text provides a literary pragmatist study of the archetypes, tropes, settings, and modes of resistance that populate the narrative of creative democracy. Above all, this book considers how these philosophers and authors construct democracy as a lived experience that gains meaning not through state institutions but through communities founded on relationships among black women and their shared understandings of culture, knowledge, experience, and rebellion.  

This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today’s Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe.

This open access book attempts to show that an examination of the list’s formal features has the potential to produce genuine insights into the production of knowledge, the poetics of literature and the composition of visual art. Following a conceptual introduction, the twelve single-authored chapters place the list in a variety of well-researched contexts, including ancient Roman historiography, medieval painting, Enlightenment periodicals, nineteenth-century botanical geography, American Beat poetry and contemporary photobooks. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book is a unique contribution to an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists.

• Examines how artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology can aid in detecting mis-/disinformation and the language of deceit in digital media content;
• Suggests practical computational means to intervene and curtail the global ‘infodemic’ of fake news;
• Presents how AI can sift, sort, and shuffle digital content, to reduce the amount of content needed to be reviewed by humans.

The 2019 European Electoral Campaign: In the Time of Populism and Social Media examines political advertising during the 2019 elections to the European Parliament, which has become the largest supranational campaign of its kind in the world. Based on a research project funded by the European Parliament, and an archive of more than 11,000 campaign items, the book draws on results from a major content analysis covering every one of the 28 member states involved. The 2019 European Electoral Campaign delivers a unique comparative assessment on the state of political communication within a European Union convulsed by momentous change. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of political communication, media, political science, history, European (Union) studies as well as a wider readership including politicians, political strategists, and journalists.

This book proposes a new theorisation when studying cyber dissidents in an African digital sphere. It argues that social media dissidents are a recent development in a long lineage of dissidents in African societies. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, the study locates contemporary dissidents in the same family with other historical dissident figures found in African orature, the Chimurenga wars, through music, poetry and other forms of expression. The book argues against techno-deterministic approaches to studying social media-born digital dissidence in Africa. It is aimed at scholars dedicated to studying social media movements in African contexts and the global south generally, prompting them to re-evaluate their earlier conclusions and adopt a more nuanced and contextspecific approach.

The chapters in this volume are a mix ofinterdisciplinary Zimbabwean scholars of linguistics, performance studies, religion, history, communication and media studies, unravelling Mtukudzi as a fighter for human rights and justice who subtly critiqued political systems and practices. It concludes that Mtukudzi strove to be a cultural worker who used the power of language through music to contribute towards the rehabilitation of a battered African identity.

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.

In various ways, Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and re-connect with their “homelands” in literature, film, and visual culture. The essays in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement in diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media. In an age of globalization, in “the Chinese Century,” the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent. The essays in this volume respond to this urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today.

This book discusses men’s friendships in relation to queer, discursive, and intersectional feminist theories. It analyses stories of intimacy, touch, hugs, and conversations, connecting these with current discussions within feminism and critical masculinity studies on “new” men, men’s political activism, and how friendships are lived and conceptualised in relation to heteronormative relationship ideals. Drawing on individual and dyadic interviews with middle-class Swedish men, all engaged in or sympathetic to feminist issues in some sense, this volume shows that Swedish gender equality ideologies as well as feminist, therapeutic, neo-liberal, and individualist discourses prevalent in the Western world structured the men’s friendships and their engagement with gender politics. Chapters cover friendship temporalities, gendered friendship ideals, friendship as men’s politics, and friendship as performed in interaction. Bridging the literatures of feminist research and friendship, the author points to tensions and contradictions in pro-feminist men’s political projects and in contemporary masculine positions.

This book explores the form, dynamics, and main reasons for media capture and conspiracy between editors and executive politicians in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since 2000. Situated in the literatures on Europeanization, democratization, party studies, and media studies, the book aims to connect these fields by showing that internal party dynamics play an important role in motivating executive politicians to hijack or collaborate with media. Against this backdrop, the book tells the story of Croatian journalism in the context of media-mafia conglomerates, political corruption, and media hijacking, and examines how "traditional" democratic drivers that the literature frequently cites, such as Europeanization and party competition, failed to prevent systematic transgressions by politicians. Methodologically, the book takes a two-pronged approach. First, nearly 50 interviews were conducted with Croatian investigative journalists, from which the narratives about the relationshipsbetween government politicians and editors over 15 years were reconstructed. In a second step, a sample of 40,000 media articles was subjected to a computational sentiment analysis, covering the same 15-year period and showing high levels of cooperation between corrupt politicians and corrupt media outlets.

This book introduces a novel approach to the analysis and practice of persuasive speaking and writing: heuristic rhetoric. The new method has evolved to fulfil the need at universities, government departments, political organisations, business enterprises and other public institutions for a modern practical alternative to classical rhetoric, which is, in the author’s view, no longer capable of giving a complete description of contemporary, predominantly mediatised, forms of public persuasive discourse, whilst other competing disciplines, such as critical discourse analysis or strategic manoeuvring, have not yet produced a set of tools, which have the comprehensive nature and practical orientation of Classical Greek and Roman rhetorical system. The book expounds heuristic rhetoric as an inter-disciplinary method to develop advanced skills of critical and strategic reasoning. Applying a novel set of principles for the strategic analysis of persuasive reasoning in complex rhetorical situations, the method emphasizes preparing and continuously adjusting argumentation according to the demands of unpredictable circumstances.

This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), then detective fiction’s very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.

This book analyzes how AKP’s embedded intellectuals operate as media spin doctors, exploring their transformation from passionately engaged intellectuals into apparatchiks. This project adapts a post-Soviet geography approach to the media, intelligentsia, and political discourse as derivative of authoritarian regimes to the Turkish context. It offers a fresh look at the Turkish political and intellectual scene and a comparative study of the populist-authoritarian politics of Turkey. 

Situated in the literature on the post-Soviet authoritarian regimes and their ways of governing, as well as their manipulation of public opinion, the book analyzes AKP-aligned intellectuals as apparatchiks. Gürpınar explores the different constellations of pro-AKP intellectuals vindicating the AKP regime from various angles, including: liberal/progressive intellectuals who initially supported the party for its liberal vistas but continued their support by twisting their progressiverhetoric; Islamist intellectuals blending their Islamism with populism; and national security intellectuals who joined after the AKP came to propagate a national security agenda. The book also provides an overview of the mechanisms of political technology, including the media landscape and its running by the AKP, intellectuals themselves as operators of political technology, and the problem of “cultural power.” The book will be of interest to those studying comparative authoritarian politics, populism, political communication, and scholars of Middle East and Eastern Europe. 

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

700 years after Dante Alighieri's death, this book intertwines the voice of the great poet with that of an exceptional contemporary, Marco Polo, who was equally curious about the geography of both earthly and celestial worlds. If Polo was the “ordinary genius” of the XIII century, the designation of “sorcerer genius” must go to Alighieri, the man with encyclopedic wisdom, at ease with his era’s philosophy, theology, and science. The sorcerer genius—well versed in this world—must create their own, which he did with The Divine Comedy. On the other hand, The Travels of Marco Polo, the greatest classic in travel literature, offers wonder and provides delight. This book combines the unforgettable characters of both books, the darkness of the infernal landscapes with the immensity of the Asian deserts, the richness of the Mongol empire with the glamor of medieval philosophy, the aspirations and dreams of two great explorers with knowledge of the science of their time, as well as the ever-eternal cosmology. This is an accessible and entertaining book for high school students, scholars of scientific history and the history of ideas, and curious readers who want to know more about Dante and Marco Polo and their unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

This book analyzes the different policy challenges that Pakistani women face and makes regionally relevant policy recommendations across different areas of private and public life, drawing on secondary data from nationally representative surveys and primary data from qualitative interviews. These areas include family safety, housing adequacy, food security and nutritional adequacy, environment and disaster protection, educational development, employment and formal sector inclusion, and health security. The author examines how the history, culture, and political climate of Pakistan have shaped social policy for women, interrogates gaps in social protections for women, and analyzes the limitations for past interventions. This text also looks at collaboration across South Asian countries, as well as using religion, social media, financing, and a new model of governance for comprehensive coverage and sustainable social policy for women. 

This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and policymakers with focus on women’s and gender studies and policy studies in South Asia.

This book looks at television comedy, drawn from across the UK and Ireland, and ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. It explores depictions of distinctive geographical, historical and cultural communities presented from the insiders’ perspective, simultaneously interrogating the particularity of the lived experience of time, and place, embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives, experiences and sensibilities, which the collected individual chapters offer. Comedies considered include Victoria Wood’s work on ‘the north’, Ireland’s Father Ted and Derry Girls, Michaela Coel’s east London set Chewing Gum, and Wales’ Gavin and Stacey. There are chapters on Scottish sketch and animation comedy, and on series set in the Midlands, the North East, the South West and London’s home counties. The book offers thoughtful reflection on funny and engaging representations of the diverse, fragmentedcomplexity of UK and Irish identity explored through the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.

The Art of Dying: 21st Century Depictions of Death and Dying examines how contemporary media platforms are used to produce creative accounts, responses and reflections on the course of dying, death and grief. Outside the public performance of grief at funerals, grief can strike in anticipation of a loss, or it can endure, continuing to interject itself and interrupt a permanently changed life. This book examines the particular affordances possessed by various contemporary creative forms and platforms that capture and illuminate different aspects of the phenomenology of dying and grief. It explores the subversive and unguarded nature of stand-up comedy, the temporal and spatial inventiveness of graphic novels, the creative constructions of documentary filmmaking, the narrative voice of young adult literature, the realism of documentary theatre, alongside more ubiquitous media such as social media, television and games. This book is testament to the power of creative expression to elicit vicarious grief and sharpen our awareness of death.   

This Open Access edited collection calls for a greater understanding of ‘the local’ within the ways the arts, culture and creative practices are governed, promoted, regulated, resourced and valued. Cultural policy studies tends to privilege the national (and international) as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted, and focuses on the ‘local’ as a case study of practice, rather than a site of policy in its own right. While this may make global policy transfer manageable for national policy agencies, it ignores the contingent relationships, diverse geographies and distinct identities of localities.

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.

This book brings together research from medical and film archives to illustrate the cultural impact of film and literature in its relationship to the discourse of plastic surgery in the 1920s. This different take on reading the body after the First World War enables students of multiple disciplines, and readers interested in both Hollywood and post-war culture, to understand some of the complexities of medical interventions gained after the First World War and the way in which they filtered into the world of Hollywood film making. It also allows readers who may not be familiar with these two 1920s stars to access the films of Lon Chaney and the books and films of Elinor Glyn and gain new insights into 1920s visual culture. For ease of readership, the book is organised so that each of the main chapters focuses on a particular film (either Lon Chaney or Elinor Glyn). This is particularly useful for use in the classroom or for online education. Readers can refer to the film directly, aided by illustrations of frames from the films. This book tells the story of how two stars of Hollywood film transformed their character’s faces on screen through a close reading of three films in the 1920s. It reveals how they applied their embodied knowledge of surgery and surgical procedures to broaden their audience’s emotional and intellectual understanding of the treatment of deformity and disability.

Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama analyses and discusses the contemporary role of stage and screen drama as a critical forum for progressive thinking in an increasingly polarised geopolitical world. The book addresses the cultural politics of socially engaged 21st century stage plays and films, and makes the case for drama as a sociopolitical forum, in which the complex and contentious issues that confront society can be explored and debated. It conceives of Anglophone political drama as a significant intervention in today’s culture wars,  representing the latter as a convenient distraction from the ongoing depredations of neoliberalism. In the main part of the book selected case-study plays and films from each of the first two decades illustrate drama’s capacity to influence critical debate on social justice issues. All of the case-study texts under discussion express a powerful aesthetics of resistance to right-wing ideology, and promote inclusive and enlightened values. This broader orientation underlines drama’s role as a channel for critical agency in today’s putative post-socialist, post-democratic climate.

This book examines the development of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) in China through the angle of Chinese Theatre, xiqu. It focuses on the political and socio-economic transition period at the turn of the 21^st century, as China evolves from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’, highlighting associated class reconstruction and cultural production and consumption. There are many forms of Chinese Theatre, the most popular one throughout Chinese history to date is the sing-song drama, collectively refers to as xiqu, which currently has over 300 regional styles across China. In 2014, President Xi Jinping’s Beijing Talk on Arts and Literature, which serves as China’s latest Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideological direction and cultural policy, stressed that ‘the future of Chinese cultural and creative industries is to be anchored on traditional art forms, such as xiqu’. Such Chinese cultural and creative industry distinction will be addressed in this book.

This book explores issues at the intersection of communication and African electoral politics, taking Ghana’s 2020 general election as a focus of investigation.

This interdisciplinary volume redresses gaps in the literature by highlighting the relevance of language and communication to electoral politics in Sub-Saharan Africa in the period of a global pandemic. The collection accounts for local influences on election discourse and illustrates how the specific context within which such discourse is enacted informs the linguistic, multimodal and technological choices of sociopolitical actors. The non-Western perspective it adopts extends work on political communication in a context underexplored in the literature and contributes to ongoing critical conversations on the decolonial and postcolonial aspects of communication studies. Drawing on a variety of data, including political speeches, political cartoons, election campaigns and social media posts, the volume not only addresses the dearth of scholarly work on African political communication, but also demonstrates the complexity of such scholarship and its importance to a comprehensive understanding of contemporary research on language and politics. This book enriches academic and public discussions on the future of democracy across the globe from a linguistic or communication perspective, expands scholarly work on African rhetoric and underscores the importance of engaging with diverse knowledge systems, especially non-Western epistemologies.

Since its 1967 production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, the Royal Shakespeare Company has been the world’s leading producer of Restoration Comedies. This book is the first to document and critique the company’s history of engagement with that repertoire. It reviews the spaces in which productions have been performed, design principles, casting, voicing, textual adaptation, musical direction, actor perspectives, and the problems of how to confront, adopt or depart from received notions of Restoration style. It goes on to posit that, for all the RSC’s explorations of Restoration Comedy, the company has maintained the repertoire as a fringe interest played out in niche spaces, while recycling many of the assumptions it claims to challenge, and that what is needed is the writer-led intervention seen in RSC and National Theatre adaptations of French drama from the same period. Only then can Restoration Comedy begin to engage wider audiences in new sites of political, historical andcultural meaning.

This volume approaches the relationship between European public sphere and political communication in the framework of establishing populism and social media. The empirical analysis focuses on the comparison between different EU countries during the 2019 EP elections campaign. The data for the analysis was collected real time from Twitter in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, Ireland and the UK. during a month period and are analyzed with both computerized quantitative and manual qualitative methods.

The book introduces a new perspective in conceptualizing populism in comparative analysis, in which populism is understood rather as an antagonist logic of political identity formation than pre-defined political ideologies, movements or party cleavages. We approach implications of populist construction of ‘us’ and ‘not us’ in national contexts of 2019 EP election campaigns to find out the relationality between different political actors and parties. A special attention is paid to national/transnational and European/Eurosceptic tendencies in campaign rhetoric. By using a unique idea of ‘hashtag publics’ we approach the common Twitter discussions around the elections and ask: what particular topics and themes did different political actors distribute over Twitter during the 2019 EP elections, how were various topics and actors linked to each other, and how were campaign agendas and actors linked to populism?

Chapter-No.1,Chapter-No.4 and Chapter-No. 8 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Grotesque Modernist Body explores how and why modernist authors drew on the traditions of the grotesque body in order to represent modern reality accurately. The author employs the concept of the grotesque body as a theoretical framework with which to examine rigorously a range of modernist novels, poems and visual media by Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and Barnes, alongside their historical contexts and theories of humour and horror. This monograph challenges the prevailing narrative of modernism’s abstract, psychological and impersonal ‘inward turn’ by tracing its mechanical-animal hybrid bodies back to

the medieval carnival satire of Rabelais, the gothic horror of the long nineteenth century, from Hoffmann, Shelley and Poe, to H.G. Wells and Henry James, and the uncanny, dreamlike art of Goya and Rousseau.

Navigating a polarized society in their representation of social values, twenty-first-century horror films critically frame conflicting and divisive ideological issues. Culture Wars and Horror Movies: Gender Debates in post-2010 US Horror Cinema analyses the ways in which these “culture wars” make their way into gender, focusing on the post-2010 US context and its fundamental political divisions.

Approaching these topics from feminist and postfeminist theories to ecocritical views, this volume explores how contemporary horror movies engage with the current context of “culture wars.”

This book argues for the reconstitution of the cultural in African cultural industries and societies. It posits that African cultural industries face a deep-seated problem of the crisis of normativity that is largely rooted in the coloniality of modern cultural policy and an unconscious, but pervasive anti-Black racism culture in the continent itself. The book places hope for re-animating African agency and national cultural identities in the decolonization of cultural policy and cultural industries as consciousness industries. Only through relevant cultural policy, a higher-order cross-institutional moral and ethical value system for reconstituting the cultural in post-colonies, can Africa build truly democratic, progressive, cosmopolitan, decolonized, and self-respecting citizens and societies. Using decolonial cultural policy studies, the book develops a decolonial cultural critique that locates African culture industries within the racialized power dynamics of capitalist modernity. It explores the decolonization praxis of cultural industries and acknowledges the complexity of cultural decolonization iniatives in a continent that is so diverse, interconnected, globalized, and facing newer modes of colonialism that are aggressive and covert.

In this ground-breaking book, we navigate the uncharted terrain of social virtual reality (VR), a technology that, while offering unprecedented immersive experiences, brings forth significant governance challenges. By merging theoretical insights with practical examples, the book examines the risks of harm in social VR environments, including both content and conduct issues. It charts a course for developing inclusive and safe social VR spaces that are respectful of diverse users’ rights and needs, laying out essential principles for policymakers, developers and regulators. The book is an urgent call to proactively shape the burgeoning field of VR for the betterment of all.

Theatre has long been an art form at the centre of public life in Poland. Whether it is the self-professed poet-prophets of the Romantic era, or the dissident theatre makers working under the strictures of state socialism, the art form has played a vital role in the development of Polish culture and politics in the context of shifting foreign occupations. This book explores the relationship between contemporary Polish theatre makers and contemporary notions of Polishness and argues that queer theory, and specifically a Polish appropriation of queer theory, can be a crucial element to better understand the politicality of the contemporary Polish theatre field. It does this by focusing on critical theatre productions which are produced at the margins of the Polish theatre field, a choice which has been made as the field is dominated by traditional drama theatres which reproduce a Polish variation on the Western canon. This makes smaller, atypical, and independent theatre productions all the more significant, as they signify a refusal to continue the traditional role of the Polish theatre field in reproducing the canon of Polish Romanticism. As such, the book argues that contemporary Polish theatre has been marked by a struggle between those building performances and state authorities that see those creations as a threat to their authority.

This edited collection delves into the multifaceted theme of 'Silenced Voices,' showcasing a diverse array of perspectives from scholars around the globe. From historical reflections to contemporary analyses, the book examines the complex dynamics of voice suppression and enablement across different media landscapes. Divided into four thematic sections, the chapters explore the challenges faced by marginalized and mainstream voices alike. From the portrayal of silenced narratives in the news media to the representation of underrepresented groups in cultural production, the collection spans a wide spectrum of issues. Authors employ varied methodological approaches to investigate the silencing of voices in the realms of politics, society, and professional media practices. Offering fresh insights and critical reflections, this volume serves as a timely contribution to ongoing debates surrounding freedom of expression, fake news, and the complexities of contemporary media environments.

This book sets out to elucidate Conrad’s unique insight into the workings of human emotions for a readership of scholars and graduate students engaged in Conrad studies. It argues that the originality of Conrad’s conception of human emotions lies in his comprehensive grasp of emotions in the broad framework of a contingent world; he regards emotions as fundamentally a manifestation of human defiance towards reality. The book takes up seven of Conrad’s works which are of significance from the perspective of emotions and contingencies, including ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Nostromo.

This book represents the first in-depth research dedicated to examining the historical and contemporary developments of Japanese film festivals as sites of cultural diplomacy. It focuses on the proliferation, network and operation of Japanese Film Festivals (JFFs) in the Asia-Pacific from the late 1970s until 2020. Through case examples in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand, the book explores how the formation and recent developments of JFFs in the region reflect wider changes in the function of Japanese cultural diplomacy through films, particularly with the intensification of economic, cultural and diplomatic opportunities presented in this geopolitical space.

This book proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics. Building on Mieke Bal’s phenomenological approach to cultural analysis (2002), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1996), and Geraint D’Arcy’s use of the mise en scène to describe space in the comics format (2020), this book layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments through affect theory and poetics to interrogate the staging of ideas which are associated with the medieval period. Considering the action, setting, and story – as well as affect, atmosphere, and mood – medieval space is contextualized as an ethically complex poetic image. This book also explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, and seeks to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text.

This book offers the first extensive investigation of Italian crime fiction in the period between 1861, the year of Italy’s unification, and 1941, when the famous Mondadori series ‘I libri gialli’, which had published crime novels since 1929, was suppressed by the fascist regime. By exploring the formal and thematic metamorphoses of Italian crime narratives and probing the different socio-political roles that they played in both the liberal and fascist periods, it provides a radical re-conceptualization, in both historical and theoretical terms, of a form of fiction that has been largely marginalized for both aesthetic and ideological reasons, uncovering how it was implicated in the construction of the modern state and in the articulation and shaping of the process of ‘making Italians’.

This book studies the works of Ann Rule, aiming to shed light on her literary career as a largely uncelebrated True Crime writer, in addition to works by other lesser-known female True Crime writers including Alia Trabucco Zerán, Katherine Ellison and Caitlin Rother. Barnes argues that Rule’s works should be regarded as landmarks in True Crime fiction. In so doing, she critically considers how Rules blended non-fiction and fiction to produce character- and plot-driven works through reliance on figurative language and varied but impactful narrative methodologies. Barnes also draws parallels between the success of iconic female writers, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, in the Golden Age of detective and crime fiction and considers the similarities, differences and connections between these genres.

The book is about comedy, the nation, and resistance in Zimbabwe, following the fall of Robert Mugabe in 2017. It explores how satiric comedies and comic texts in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe contest hegemonic narratives of the nation and authorise alternative narratives from the margins. Drawing on postcolonial theories of the nation, it analyses subversive comedies and social media texts that contest official political narratives in Zimbabwe, including the comedies of four Zimbabwean comedians—Kapfupi and Marabha, Doc Vikela, and Sabhuku Vharazipi—as well as social media texts on President Mnangagwa’s Facebook Page and cartoons published by the Zimbabwean newspaper ZimDaily. Primarily found via social media platforms (Facebook and Youtube), these texts centre alternative views and narratives of ordinary citizens, contesting established truths and providing a counter-narration to official hegemonic discourses of the nation.

Where existing scholarship on post-Mugabe politics in Zimbabwe focuses on issues such as the coup, militarisation, and discourses of "newness", little attention has been paid to the forms of resistance used in everyday discourse by Zimbabweans, and particularly via satire and comedy. These comic texts, shared by comedians and normal citizens on social media, can provide a useful alternative perspective to make sense of the politics and political performances that characterize the new political dispensation after Mugabe.

How Vocaloid Works explores the technical aspects of Vocaloid, the world’s most widely known and commercially successful singing voice synthesis software. Unlike previous Anglophone academic works on the subject, this book provides readers with a deeper understanding of the technological foundations of Yamaha’s concatenative synthesis approach as well as its updated AI synthesis engine. Vocaloid’s ground-breaking ability to generate a range of both life-like and distinctly artificial timbres continues to demonstrate its lasting impact. However, with the advent of machine learning models capable of both music generation and audio deepfakes, the future of Vocaloid’s position at the forefront of the industry is uncertain. The book examines into how Vocaloid can create human(oid) vocal sound, covering the fundamentals of acoustic voice production, auditory perception, analog audio, digital signal processing and deep neural networks in order to account for the effectiveness and appeal of synthesized singing voices.

The digital revolution has sparked a new wave of inequality, particularly in access to technology and its benefits. Understanding these disparities is vital for grasping their impact on contemporary society. One manifestation is through artificial intelligence, algorithms, and misinformation. AI-driven systems, used in decision-making like job applications and loan approvals, can exhibit biases due to skewed datasets. Algorithms also spread false information on social media platforms with minimal oversight.

Digital labor and the platform economy exacerbate inequality. While platforms like Uber and Airbnb offer income opportunities, workers lack basic protections like minimum wage laws. Additionally, personal data is often exploited without consent. Cybersafety and cybercrime further highlight digital inequalities. Some have access to robust security measures, while others lack basic knowledge, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. Economic barriers also hinder participation in gaming and other digital spaces. Big data collection practices can deepen existing disparities, especially regarding socioeconomic status and demographics. Public policies must address these issues to ensure equal access to technology for all.

This book aims to shed light on these disparities and develop solutions for a more equitable technological landscape.

Staging the Ghost Story is the first book to offer a critical appraisal of the centuries-long relationship between the ghost story and the English stage. The book balances a critical consideration of the ghost story in performance, its history, its cultural politics, and its generic conventions, with practical insight regarding the valency of live representations of the supernatural, the challenges of embodiment, and the power of storytelling. Throughout, it draws upon accompanying interviews with prominent directors, playwrights, performers and stage designers in the industry, including Mark Gatiss, Robin Herford, Michael Holt, Danny Robins, Robert Lloyd Parry, Rebecca Vaughan, Tajinder Singh Hayer, Glen Neath, Adam Z. Robinson, Richard Sutton, Paul Voodini, and Jonathan Goodwin. With a focus upon the seminal elements of theatrical performance: time, space, bodies, devices, and audience, the book invites the elusive shadows of the ghost story to take centre stage.

This collection examines how activism, media, and creative practices shape our understanding of the climate crisis. Bringing together perspectives from media studies, environmental humanities, and artistic research, Confronting the Climate Crisis: Activism, Technology and Ecoaesthetics explores how digital technologies, protest movements, and ecoaesthetic interventions influence ecological discourse. Fifteen chapters interrogate a range of case studies, from student activism and climate-related art to the role of video games, memes, and machine learning in framing and comprehending environmental collapse. The collection also considers how experimental cinema, podcasts, and documentary practices can move beyond entertainment and spectacle to foster lasting and meaningful action against environmental change. Highlighting the intersections of politics, technology, and aesthetics, this book offers a vital resource for scholars, artists, and activists seeking to navigate and challenge contemporary climate narratives. It argues that creative and technological interventions are essential to rethinking our relationship with the planet and shaping new modes of ecological action.

This Open Access book offers a mixed-method approach to analysing anti-Muslim narratives in interactions between the far right and the Western European mainstream. By exploring narratives that portray Islam as inherently other, the essays in this collection interrogate the effects of such narratives on the targeted group and mainstream society. Authors explore mechanisms, such as historical othering, media agenda building, and online mobilization of the far right, and harness historical analysis, media content, social media network analyses and qualitative surveys, to propose that the effects of such media narratives are far from purely symbolic.

This book discusses five recent, hand-drawn, comics memoirs of women’s mental health experiences, not easily captured in words alone. It deals with a range of mental health experiences that are not simply diagnoseable mental disorders, and do not always stem from visible physical conditions (heavy feelings, loneliness, postpartum depression, grief, schizophrenia and suicide). Yet, by also considering the formal qualities of these stories, it is able to focus on embodied aspects of experience, inflecting these with perspectives from a range of women of various ages, sexualities, genders, races and cultures. This book demonstrates how comics are an effective, interdisciplinary means of communicating women’s mental health and wellbeing.

This book traces the intertextual genealogy behind Netflix’s new series Ripley, directed by Steve Zaillian, and offers a critical examination of Tom Ripley’s enduring appeal across different media. As the series quickly climbs Netflix’s international charts, this volume provides a timely and insightful contribution to the Ripleyverse, exploring the character’s complex moral and sexual dimensions in today’s cultural context. McEntee investigates Ripley’s role within the televisual antihero genre, engaging with theories from Jason Mittell’s Complex TV and Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s The Antihero in American Television. While Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Ripley aims to generate empathy, this book contends that traditional frameworks for understanding antiheroes are insufficient. Instead, it introduces Eric Leake’s notion of “difficult empathy” as a more appropriate model for analyzing Scott’s Ripley, offering a fresh perspective on the character’s moral ambiguity. This contrasts sharply with Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation, where Matt Damon’s Ripley elicited a more straightforward emotional response. Readers will discover a nuanced discussion of how Ripley both adheres to and subverts the conventions of the antihero genre and comments self-reflexively on the process of adaptation. The book invites scholars and students of television studies, film, and literature to engage with these themes, providing a rich resource for understanding the evolving landscape of media narratives. Whether you are a scholar of media studies or a curious reader intrigued by the complexities of modern narratives, this book promises to deepen your understanding of the cultural significance of Tom Ripley’s latest iteration.

This book reinvigorates discussions of play and mobile locative gaming. This book analyses the fluid and hard-to-define process of playful place-making and asks how play operates as a form of mobility. The primary question of this book is, how might the act of playing location-based games be integral to forms of place-making? Moreover, how might this practice of place-making contribute to platformisation? The primary theoretical underpinning for this book is the sociological paradigm of mobilities – an emphasis on the movement of peoples and society. Adding to this discussion is the act of play – whereby this book considers play in location-based gaming to be a formative urban mobility that impacts and shapes how we create, inhabit, and belong across multiple contexts.