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Perhaps more than any other text, Virgil's Aeneid has had an impact on Western literature and society. The reasons for this popularity seem obvious, for it contains all the elements one would want in an enduring tale: a brave hero, an arduous yet eventually successful journey and quest, a tragic love plot, a people searching for a homeland. Taken on such a level, it would appear to be perfect material for a Hollywood blockbuster and multiple spin-offs. Yet to date, there have been remarkably few receptions of the work in modern popular culture, although Troy and the Trojan War continue to thrive, with receptions multiplying across genres and for all age groups. If Greece was, until recently, in the words of Gideon Nesbit, the neglected 'dog in the nighttime'; in terms of classical reception and popular culture, Aeneas is the invisible hero, rarely glimpsed at all. This paper provides a brief overview of the reception of Virgil's Aeneid in modern popular culture, considering popular fiction, children's literature, poetry, screen and stage, before making some suggestions about why Virgil's epic poem has failed to take hold in this culture in the way that Homer's have, and what this suggests about both the Aeneid and contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the English translation of Chinese classics from the perspective of cultural communication. Through the analysis, it is hoped that the communication of Chinese traditional culture can be promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the evolution of Shakespeare studies over the last 50 years and proposes a narrative to trace its development since the commemoration of Shakespeare’s birth in 1964 in three phases: first, the unfolding from the 1970s to the 1990s of what I have called the postmodern paradigm in Shakespeare studies, which I argue breaks with previous humanist universalising readings of his plays; second, the serious consideration of Shakespeare on screen in the 1990s and the 2000s, an academic field that grows in the context of performance and popular culture studies; and, third, the scholarly analysis of Shakespeare’s plays in the digital media in the new millennium, a period that also witnesses the study of the bard on the global stage of world cultures, with the continued perception that his work is both core British heritage and inevitable global commodity. These most recent trends in Shakespeare studies were present in the overall approach to the celebration of the bard during the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad, an event with Shakespeare at its centre that can be seen as the forerunner of the explosion of activities in 2016 for the 400th commemoration of his death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss topics including the challenge of understanding the role of book as medium in the interaction of print culture with networks of circulation, the use of Shakespearean lines in the emerging media phenomenon and dynamic relation of media with film and the theater.

This essay discusses diarist and collector Pierre de Estoile of Paris, France, focusing on how his collecting activities of ephemeral print and print culture of the French Wars of Religion exemplified record keeping in the early modern period. He created a scrapbook he entitled "Drolleries of the League" which featured printed works created between the 1585 treaty of Péronne until the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which declared that all records of the wars should be destroyed and erased.

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This article provides a study of the disguise theme in texts from the French epic literary tradition of twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the theme of disguise was developed through many different ways and multiple perspectives. From the option which suggests a kind of double interpretation in a particular context where it is possible to detect clear interferences with popular culture, to the confirmation of the authentic epic scheme, this analysis through the French epic chanson de geste tradition provides an overview of the main disguise features in texts such as Le Couronnement de Louis, Le Charroi de Nîmes, La Prise d'Orange concerning Guillaume d'Orange and the related cycle of poems. The survey continues with Maugis d'Aigremont, and discusses the topic of the trickster, where the disguise theme is enforced by magic and fairy elements. These elements suggest a wide range of implications and meanings, such as the struggles between regal authority and vassals, inside a frame of sociological value as recognized in the Renaut de Montauban and the presence of a popular culture level through the representation of his adventures and magic features in the Maugis d'Aigremont poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a reading of the 1988 novel "Misery" and the manual/memoir "On Writing," by Stephen King as reflecting anxieties and ambiguities concerning the demarcation of popular culture and the role of the writer. Topics covered include the question of whether popular culture can be claimed as a positive label, the different views of popular culture, and how cultural divide is dramatized in "Misery."

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The article introduces the theme of the journal, namely literature and/or popular culture in Taiwan, including depiction of the deity Nezha in popular Taiwanese culture, literary criticism of Taiwanese authors, especially gay authors, and historical literature in Taiwanese popular culture.

The paper argues the case of the contemporary novel genre, emphasising its culture-bound function, conspicuous in the thesis novel. In the postliterate age of the late 20th century, narrative fiction recorded and openly politicized human experience. This message is fictitiously delivered and particularly explicit in the lad and feminist English novel of the century's last decades. The British cultural inventory and partisan construal of social reality is the subject matter of Fever Pitch (1992) by Nick Hornby and The Passion (1987) by Jeanette Winterson. The representation of the people who narratively think of themselves in terms of a community is indebted to the language of folk memory. The aesthetic discourse circulates the public idiom of pop culture clichés, popular sweeping-statements and examples of normative behaviour. Conclusively, gendered recollections of the past are provided for the cultural use of readers who plot to read literature in the social interest, ideological advantage and political benefit of the same sex members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hungarian Studies (02366568) is the property of Akademiai Kiado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Yearbook of the Faculty of Political Sciences / Godisnjak Fakultet Politickih Nauka Beograd is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article aims at showing how Shakespeare relied on the medical vocabulary shared by his coeval society, which had, for centuries, been witnessing the continuous process of vernacularization of ancient and medieval scientific texts. After outlining the state of early modern medicine, the author presents and discusses the results of her search for relevant medical terms in nine plays by Shakespeare. In order to do this, a wide range of medical treatises has been analysed (either directly or through specific corpora such as Medieval English Medical Texts, MEMT 2005, and Early Modern English Medical Texts, EMEMT 2010), so as to verify the ancestry or the novelty of Shakespearean medical words. In addition to this, the author has also built a corpus of word types derived from seventeenth-century quack doctors' handbills, with the purpose of creating a word list of medical terms connected to popular rather than university medicine, comparable with the list drawn out of the Shakespearean plays. The results most stressed in the article concern Shakespeare's use of medical terminology already well known to his contemporary society (thus confuting the Oxfordian thesis about the impossibility for William Shakespeare the actor to master so many medical words) and the playwright's skill in transforming -- rather than inventing -- old popular terms. The article is accompanied by five tables that collect the results of the various lexicographical searches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Shakespeare's creations are said to be infused by the structures of popular culture, it remains uncertain how closely his characters echo the phrases of everyday speech. The text alone cannot tell us how Shakespeare's contemporaries talked, or what commoners said of each other or of those in authority above them. Fortunately alternative and complementary sources exist that yield informal and unscripted utterances by ordinary men and women in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Court reports, depositions, and examinations by magistrates preserve versions of scandalous and transgressive words that were never intended to be recorded. These include the gendered language of insult, expressions of social complaint, and verbal challenges to royal authority. Despite problems of mediation, ventriloquism, and scribal processing, of the sort familiar to literary scholars, these archival traces reveal a vigorous vein of plebeian speech, that can be compared to the 'speeches' of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Abundant examples illuminate the popular discursive culture of Shakespeare's age and environment, and suggest the possibility of building towards a new corpus of demotic and non-literary text that can be compared to the language of the plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses topics within this special issue dedicated to exploring the history of ideas of romance and love in American popular culture such as frontier love stories, romance comics, and a study of how the social movements of the 1960s impacted role expectations in interpersonal relationships.

Triangulating genre, gender, and performance, this paper expands Hamlet criticism by examining Ophelia's mad ballads through the lens of popular culture. While ballads perpetuated the vigorous performance practices that Hamlet disparages as vulgar, this paper argues that Shakespeare exploits precisely these "low" aspects of the ballad to produce the tragedy of Ophelia's madness. Shakespeare uses ballads to establish a privileged relationship between Ophelia and the audience and to stage a gender-based critique of Elsinore. In conversation with Hamlet's elitism, Ophelia's ballads demonstrate that Shakespeare simultaneously delegitimizes popular performance and embraces its theatrical possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter deals with three trends in academic writing on popular culture and is divided into three sections: 1. TV: New Media, Digital Technology and the Archive; 2. Gender and Popular Culture; 3. The Popular Cultural Text. The first section examines a number of texts which analyse the impact of digital and other new technologies on our consumption of popular culture, the role of those technologies in evolving industry practices, and on our awareness of the history of the media. The second looks at a series of texts which examine representations of gender in popular culture (demonstrating, in passing, the sheer persistence of the term post-feminism, and the continuing need to subject it to rigorous critical analysis). The third section looks at works which deal with particular popular cultural texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "English in Asian Popular Culture" edited by Jamie Lee and Andrew Moody.

Copyright of Estudios de Literatura Colombiana is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Facultad de Comunicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An essay is presented on various critiques of the field of cultural studies. It references the book "Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity" by Hans Turley. According to the author, Turley's book demonstrates that cultural studies remains a viable and productive field. It is suggested that Turley's work links popular narratives and historical context to classical works of literature such as Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," illuminating all three.

The article discusses the literacy challenges of popular culture for English teachers. According to the author, the major challenge for English teachers is motivating students to read challenging texts. The challenges of digital media in the critical thinking and reading skills of students are highlighted.

As part of this special section dedicated to the Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934-2010), this article explores his journalism in the 1960s in the newsweekly magazine Primera Plana. The most influential magazine of the decade, Primera Plana formed Argentine political opinion and cultural tastes. Martínez was the premier cultural journalist of the magazine, developing a distinctive style of 'new journalism'. The article analyses his key role in developing film and literary criticism in Argentina and Latin America, as well as his coverage of a range of contemporary issues, from the anniversary of Hiroshima to the Russian space race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain during the 1970s saw the publication of a spate of cheap, lurid novels based around the sensationalised portrayal of subcultural groups such as skinheads and motorcycle gangs. Publisher New English Library led the field, with books such as ‘Skinhead’ and ‘Suedehead’, and this article analyses such books in relation to their social, economic and political context. Focusing on the novels' narratives and representations, it argues that the genre was constituent in broader media constructions of 1970s Britain as being beset by a social and political ‘crisis’. The article concludes by considering the books' appeal. The genre, it is argued, was rooted in traditions of ‘exploitation’ fiction characterised by open-ended ambivalence. As such, the novels could be understood in a variety of ways. Their worldview was often authoritarian and chauvinistic, but their emphasis on defiant rebellion also gave the books significant cachet among the subcultures they represented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Literature and Popular Culture, a course in the MA Postcolonial Literature in English exposes students to the manifestations of popular culture in literature. By examining various popular literary genres, the students are trained to see the significance of popular culture within everyday realities using rhetorical methods as well as critical theories. As part of their research paper, students are required to observe, reflect, describe and critically analyse several forms of popular culture and expected to understand how some literary works evolve from high culture to popular culture, thus becoming a significant force in the everyday lives of the masses. However, as the course involves a study of the types of popular culture mostly originating from the West, students find it difficult to identify the underlying patterns prevalent in the texts. In addition, although the students come from diverse non-Western ethnic backgrounds, their interpretations are one-dimensional, usually projecting the mainstream views. As ideology is a prevalent concept in popular culture, it is felt that an understanding of this concept will help them to develop multiple perspectives in their study of literature and popular culture. Therefore, this paper will focus on how understanding ideology can be an intervention method into unearthing multiple meanings in literature and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teenlit, a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominantly of female adolescents. Its rapid rise has invited both favourable and hostile reactions from observers. Sympathetic literary critics view young people's attraction to it as a positive process towards the development of a healthy reading and writing habit. Meanwhile, hostile critics consider it as nothing more than light fiction containing questionable moral values, written in an unacceptable style. This article examines a representative example of such criticisms as a platform for discussing the relationship between the relatively new genre of adolescent literature and the wider context of language change. It seeks to show that hostility towards teenlit reflects a concern for the maintenance of standard Indonesian as the language of literature amid a rapidly changing language situation in which a major colloquial variety of Indonesian has been gaining prominence and encroaching on domains prescriptively associated with the standard variety, such as written literature. The negative reaction is also an assertion of an idealized view of literature, which holds that the function of adolescent fiction is to educate readers on the aesthetic function of language and sound moral values. The author demonstrates that this concern arises against the backdrop of a socio-political climate in which the state, having long exerted control over language use and language development, gradually ceases to be perceived as the sole authority on language. As such, it is an articulation of a desire to safeguard the existence of a linguistic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Coleridge wrote Aids to Reflection (1825), he believed print culture was perilously dominated by empirical and utilitarian forms of rationality and manipulative appeals to a rational reading public. By guiding future educators and authors to discover within themselves an indwelling divine Reason (Logos), Coleridge hoped to promote a reformed print network through which the nation would recognize itself as a spiritual republic of letters. To this end, Coleridge addressed young readers of Aids as if he were personally leading them into self-reflection within the classroom of his text. If Coleridge asked readers to confuse print with presence, he used this delusion to undermine a fiction he considered more dangerous – a purely mechanical universe. The new dynamic spirit in science, Coleridge claimed, demonstrated that the book a reader held depended on a level of reality at which his or her deeper self was sustained by the Logos. I argue that one graduate from the virtual academy of Aids, F. D. Maurice, surprisingly extended Coleridge's views, and in a direction Coleridge would never have approved: read self-reflectively, Maurice asserted, even a page of advertisements became a virtual portal into the nation's spiritual community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paper really has two themes. One will be an exploration of how Hollywood dealt with imperial themes involving British India (really Afghanistan) with the Lancers and the Canadian west with the "Mounties". Here the disarming relationship of child film star Shirley Temple with "savage native peoples" comes into play. A second more central theme centers on the film career of Shirley Temple herself and her roles in Wee Willie Winkie and Susannah of the Mounties. Her apogee of popularity reached its peak in the period 1937-1939, the time frame for both films. Although she made some films in 1940, Susannah really marked an end to a certain period of her career as puberty beckoned. The peculiar gender relationship with the principle male characters (Victor McLaglen and Randolph Scott) will then be explored, showing how her "non-threatening white sexuality" did not impinge on the two masculine imperial frontier domains. All this points to Shirley Temple as a cultural icon and as a commercial and sexual commodity in American popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of music as dynamic classroom tool in teaching dystopian literature in the U.S. It states that the album of heavy metal band Queensrÿche was used by a high school teacher to connect to the classic novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four." It notes that using music in various forms such as hip-hop, heavy metal and country music in the classroom from elementary school level to college level can be effective.

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the significance of popular cultures for postcolonial studies, the essays concerning non-literary instances of screen cultures, and popular religion in South India.

Reading Letitia Landon's literary criticism in the context of the periodical reviews of her imaginative publications reveals that her poetry placed her at the hub of a contemporary debate on literary values in which both sides viewed literature as a force for social amelioration, but disagreed over the qualities that made it effective, a debate on which Landon herself weighed in through her critical essays. At a time when reviewers frequently sought to police out of literature the corruption of what they viewed as inauthentic, conventional, feminized sentimentality, Landon's critical essays reveal a commitment to emphasis on sentiment which enabled her to cultivate among her readers a community of shared feeling and collective sympathy, a poetic purpose that she saw as placing her work alongside some of the most respected among Romantic-period authors. As serious about her artistry as about her commercial success, she confronted critical speculation about the emotional inauthenticity and biographical veracity of her poems' subjects by theorizing a breach between the poetic persona and the author's private self, where feeling is free to circulate to the mass reading audiences of the emerging world of commercial literary success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Glam" and "glitz" popular culture produced for the nouveaux riches and the masses, respectively, is defined and analyzed with regard to its displacement of serious literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's literature has long been dominated by the flat rectangle of the page, and more recently, of the screen. It is easy to assume that the recent flood of literary-related commodities and collectibles represents something very new. But popular culture has spawned a similar industry of multimodal materials for well over a century, and children's authors such as Beatrix Potter and L. Frank Baum mastered the art of the spin-off and the collectible in the very early days of the twentieth century. This article investigates questions about changes in children's literary culture through the lens of past, present, and future, and explores a shifting future world where texts become ever more hybrid, porous, slippery, and unfinished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It does not go without saying that literature should be read or taught in universities in these bad days. Worldwide, we are experiencing many challenging problems and transformations -- climate change, global financial meltdown, the defunding of universities, the dominance of new digital media, a big shift from literary study to cultural studies. Reading literature hardly seems likely to help confront these problems. Two positive answers to the question in the title can nevertheless be given: 1) Reading literature, for those who like to do it, is an end in itself, a good in itself. 2) Literature may possibly teach its readers how to resist the lies and distortions with which we are inundated in the media and in politicians' speeches these days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents an examination into the history of pirated chapbook editions of the 18th-century English literary work "Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe. Introductory comments are given noting the typical scholastic attention to the chapbook abridgments as weaker forms of the original novel. Contrary views are then given suggesting that the chapbooks are a manifestation of popular culture appropriating the story and retelling it in unique and noteworthy ways. Analysis is particularly given discussing which plot points in the narrative were deemed most important in the 24-page editions of the work and their implications on contemporary society at the time.

The essay explores women and their lapdogs in eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Some of the works considered include Virginia Wolf's novella "Flush," a biography Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog; Alexander Pope’s poem "The Rape of the Lock;" and Henry Fielding’s play, "The Modern Husband." Subjects considered include pet-keeping, love, and European cultural history.

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The essay discusses broadside ballads, considering how they represent changes in English early modern popular culture due to their inexpensive production costs, their wide distribution, and the various ways they were transmitted to the public. It focuses particularly on the sixteenth century flyting, or controversial printed debate, regarding decorum held principally between authors Thomas Camel and Thomas Churchyard which appeared in broadside ballads in 16th century England.

The article presents a historical study of crime in nineteenth-century Great Britain and compares crime statistics with a frequency analysis of words such as murder, robbery, and violence appearing in the texts of British newspapers, especially "The Times" and "The Manchester Guardian." It explores "New Journalism" and sensationalism in the press and popular literature and considers how such literature swayed popular opinion regarding crime. Other subjects include the early 19th century reform of criminal law and penal policies; the use of both capital and corporal punishments; the codification of criminal laws; Victorian mass media and print culture; and literacy, subscription libraries, and readership of periodicals.

The resurgence of revolutionary literature or Red Classics at the turn of the century is indicative of the cultural logic of the revolutionary hegemony during Mao and post-Mao China. Revolutionary hegemony served quite effectively to legitimate Mao Zedong's, and much of Deng Xiaoping's reign, but it has become increasingly difficult to sustain its viability and efficacy. From the beginning of the new century, both the state and consumer popular culture sectors have pushed for a Red Classic resurgence. While the ideological content and styles of the Red Classics are apparently incommensurable to China's social reality today, their current popularity suggests a success in capturing or eliciting emotional responses from the audience primarily derived from their lived and felt experience during the Mao era. For the state, the Red Classics and the entire revolutionary legacy can now exist only as mummies of history, serving as a nationalist, 'patriotic' narrative of the recent past. Meanwhile, the Red Classics is reinvented as nostalgia, a commodity in China's cultural market. The paper examines the genealogy and current reinvention of the Red Classics, in order to shed some light on China's post-revolutionary cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the simultaneous and contradictory conceptions of Kenyan history by rereading popular representations of the Mau Mau war of Kenyan independence and its postindependence consequences. It examines twenty-first-century evocations and appropriations of Mau Mau in relation to earlier discourses in literature and politics. It discovers that contemporary artists and citizens deploy references to Mau Mau outside of its historical context to address, in highly emotive language, contemporary problems in Kenya, such as runaway corruption and police brutality. It reads emergent artists and writers against the background of more dominant and canonical work to demonstrate the evolution of popular memory and the need to consider everyday, marginal, and liminal texts in a postcolonial context where the perspectives of ordinary people are excluded from official archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how post-World War II magazine narratives made tourist travel part of a larger discourse about gender, sex, and consumerism in American society. The study finds that while magazines often depicted travel as a carnivalesque activity disruptive of everyday domestic norms, they also circulated narratives that reconciled those fantasies with dominant conventions of femininity and masculinity. By exploring the meanings attached to vacation travel during this period, scholars can better understand how magazines, as engines of consumer desire, mediated between transgressive and structured aspects of American culture. And one can see how popular journalism depicted the consumerism and leisure that characterized a unique, American standard of living in ways that affirmed gendered structures of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article criticizes the theatrical production, "Endymion," by John Lyly, which praises Queen Elizabeth I and the problem of women in power. It analyzes the relationship between the classical mythography and witchcraft in the characters to value the importance of the roles of women in the play. It mentions that the piece lacks influence in popular culture, in which the healing practices of women in the play uses bewitchment.

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The author discusses the success of the fiction of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, including "The Dirty Girls Social Club" and mentions that Valdes-Rodriguez attempts to make Latinas palatable to mainstream consumers. She discusses Valdes-Rodriguez' ideas on race and interethnic distinctions within the context of the broader publishing industry and the discourse concerning race and ethnicity in the U.S. She notes that Latina/o readers are viewed as an untapped market with the potential to revitalize a flagging industry. However, she cautions against allowing the marketplace to define the meaning of being Latina/o.