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By exploring housing transitions and their impact on the leisure practices of 12, white, British economically 'middling' men aged between 20 and 26 whilst utilising the work of British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, this article articulates a cultural studies critique of social generational approaches. Firstly, it shows how this approach to young lives can remedy the 'base' determining 'superstructure' logic underpinning social generational approaches. Secondly, drawing on Williams' concepts can foreground culture as constitutive of contemporary transitional pathways. Finally, this approach can continue the impetus of 'blending' of cultural and transitional approaches found within social generational approaches. Doing so will show how a cultural studies approach can help supplement insights into continuity and change within contemporary young lives whilst still enabling a critical focus on class, gender and race. Taken together, this article looks to enable a productive engagement with social generational approaches to critically interrogate the experiences of young people in ever-changing social, cultural, economic and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article unpacks the material publication process of George Jackson's Soledad Brother. While much has been written on the enduring political and intellectual significance of this work, cultural materialist analysis can unpack how this book reached publication and why its material channels of communication are important for spatial thinking on prisons. The social networks, clandestine maneuvers, and legal loopholes that led to the book's publication all signal how the prison bears creative insurgent pathways within its architecture of racist incapacitation. Jackson's publication process highlights the disordering ruptures, incorrigibility, and out‐of‐sync moments that people incarcerated produce under the constraints of carceral control. Cultural materialist analysis of Soledad Brother not only is instructive for comprehending the politics, culture, and geography of California prisons in the early 1970s but also illuminates the everyday Black radical pulse of carceral resistance that produces space under some of the harshest conditions of carceral duress. The article ends by highlighting Jackson's continued influence in shaping prison resistance movements, at large and small scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am proposing a manifesto for degrowth pedagogies. Designed for Higher Education institutions and theatre pedagogues, I argue the need to develop a system of theatre training based on degrowth theory. Developed from French intellectual thought in the early 1970s, degrowth diagnoses the climate, ecological, socio-political and spiritual crises, as symptoms of capitalism's growth imperative, with its impulse for ever-increasing productivity in spite of the direct and ever-increasing detriment to people and planet. The theatre sector exists in a position of subservience to this growth-centric, socio-economic model – under pressure to adopt growthist practices in theatrical production, such as high-carbon international touring; ideological conformism to attract 'greenwashing' corporate funding; among other phenomena. Yet, to avoid contributing to climate, ecological and societal breakdown, the theatre sector will need to understand and adopt degrowth practices. Theatre pedagogy is an ideal site to affect change. Theatre training institutions must undergo a transition towards new ways of serving their students, as well as local and global communities, while inviting new generations of theatre-makers to create differently; to consider how the aesthetics, forms and material realities of their practice can embody 'slow' and degrowth theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Olga tokarczuk, the nobel laureate in literature, has captivated readers with her intricate narratives that delve into the depths of human experiences. She captures the complex and nuanced experiences that often elude easy articulation. The fragmented structure of her novels mirrors the fragmented nature of contemporary experience, reflecting the disorienting effects of globalization and rapid technological change. Her characters are constantly on the move, traversing physical and psychological boundaries, and their identities in flux. The article demonstrates how tokarczuk masterfully portrays the complexities of identity, power, and social change, inviting readers to critically engage with the forces that shape our understanding of the world. It further highlights tokarczuk's contribution to contemporary fiction by capturing the zeitgeist of our era, marked by displacement, fragmented identities, and ecological concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-first century, film adaptation studies shifted to the reworking of the literary text within the new sociopolitical situation of the time. Such literary theories as cultural materialism can explicate the film adaptation. Here, Daneliya’s Hopelessly Lost (1973) is investigated focusing on the political orientations of the Soviet-American Cold War. Hence, through cultural materialism a window is opened unto the past literary text of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be read within the political presence of the Cold War. Per se, Sinfield’s practice of reading known as a ‘theater of war’ is applied to show the cracks and the faultlines that the director has used to depict his narrative of the Cold War. Therefore, it is demonstrated that Hopelessly Lost (1973) is a film adaptation that has focused on those parts of the novel that contain the dark images of the United States and attempts to develop the types of mutations that are in line with this orientation. Altogether the narrative of the film adaptation promulgates a grim reality that implicates the inevitable downfall of the United States amidst the political alignment of the Cold War through the character of Uncle Sam.

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi 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.)

In the twenty-first century, film adaptation studies shifted to the reworking of the literary text within the new sociopolitical situation of the time. Such literary theories as cultural materialism can explicate the film adaptation. Here, Daneliya's Hopelessly Lost (1973) is investigated focusing on the political orientations of the Soviet-American Cold War. Hence, through cultural materialism a window is opened unto the past literary text of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be read within the political presence of the Cold War. Per se, Sinfield's practice of reading known as a 'theater of war' is applied to show the cracks and the faultlines that the director has used to depict his narrative of the Cold War. Therefore, it is demonstrated that Hopelessly Lost (1973) is a film adaptation that has focused on those parts of the novel that contain the dark images of the United States and attempts to develop the types of mutations that are in line with this orientation. Altogether the narrative of the film adaptation promulgates a grim reality that implicates the inevitable downfall of the United States amidst the political alignment of the Cold War through the character of Uncle Sam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, published in 1966, gives a voice to the silenced woman Antoinette, who was a victim of both patriarchal and colonial society. The novel, written to serve as a prequel to Jane Eyre, aims to destroy the Eurocentric perceptions constructed by the British writer Charlotte Brontë in her novel titled Jane Eyre against Antoinette, known as Bertha Mason. Brontë, in her novel written more than a century earlier, had given little place to Antoinette and depicted her only as a mad woman. Antoinette, in search of a female identity, struggles to find her identity after the emancipation of Jamaica. Aiming at freeing a woman of mixed race, who is stuck within two ethnicities and cultures, Rhys becomes an intermediary in giving a voice to the madwoman who was imprisoned in the attic by her British husband Mr Rochester in England. In her attempt to get rid of the oppressions she has experienced by the two cultures and to reach the freedom she desires, Antoinette finally commits suicide by jumping off. In this study, cultural materialism has been used in order to reflect the social, economic, and political conditions along the power relations of the period.

Until 1988 Stephen Greenblatt practiced a kind of criticism which was closer to Cultural Materialism in its emphasis on ideology, on the exercise of state power in creating narratives supporting its desired self-image. In “Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare” (Chicago University Oress, 1982), Greenblatt undertakes a Foucauldian archaeology into the imaginary which caught the public eye in an age reputed for its self-dramatization and acting. Alan Sinfield assumed his position as cultural materialist, which he equates with political dissidence, in his book, “Faultlines” (1992) from the very title: “Faultlines Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading”. Included in this book is an essay on “Cultural Materialism, Othello, and the Politics of Plausibility”. In a New Historicist approach to the play (“The Shakespearean Search for Archetypes”, 2020), Maria-Ana Tupan reads the plot against other texts that circulated at the time, and which account for the cognitive background of the characters. Neema Parvini, a scholar from the University of Surrey, is a telling example of the way New Historicism works, that is, through a historicized and theorized approach to the author in question and through meditation on the tools of his interpretation (metatheory). New Historicism too distances itself from the official canon, focusing on less known texts whose marginalization is seen as the policy of networks of power. Raymond Williams launched a concept somewhat similar to Foucault’s episteme – the “structure of feeling” – and his contribution to cultural anthropology dates back to 1961 when he published “The Long Revolution”. In Marin Sorescu’s “Vărul Shakespeare” (“Cousin Shakespeare”), for instance, Hamlet’s rage against the corruption of the Danish court swells so high because he is absolute for the humanistic ideals and values which were indeed current in the author’s time, but which do not characterize either the time of the action (dated by Saxo Grammaticus at about 1200 AD) nor the time of the author rewriting it for a postmodern audience. Similarly, D. R. Popescu produces a palimpsestic text in his 2012 novel, “Simonetta Berlusconi. Calugarul Filippo Lippi și călugărița Lucrezia Buti”, where not only do characters join a transhistorical party (the author too lapses into the chronodiegetic universe of the Italian Renaissance, visited by a refugee from Vlad the Impaler’s land) but the very ontological stability of the worlds vanishes into the faultlines separating authors, critics, editors, characters. The ongoing discussions about the sources, tenets, concepts and protocols of New Historicism, which are trying to breathe new life into a critical theory which colonized literary studies at the turn of the millennium, are revisionist and summative, locating New Historicism in the general picture assembled by William Wolfreys as editor of a book of essays on “Criticism at the 21st Century ”(Edinburgh University Press, 2002).

This article unearths Raymond Williams' approach to communication as transport and social networks. Existing literature argues that the field of communication's withdrawal from the study of transport leads to at least two setbacks: media presentism and a narrowed meaning of communication and culture. This article excavates Williams' concept of 'communication as transport and social networks' by first revisiting his larger method of cultural materialism that sees communication as a whole complex assemblage of different modes of communication to facilitate connection. This is then followed by a discussion on the use of this concept in his various works and, more intensively, in The Country and the City. To emphasize Williams' relevance to contemporary contexts, the next part of the article deals with an analysis of how digital media and contemporary transport networks facilitate the reproduction of Bali as a paradise. This article calls for a more dialectical understanding of communication that includes the inextricable relations between mobility and sociality, the material and the symbolic, and the transmission and the ritual in shaping human lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a technology, theatre both absorbs and represents the technologies it deploys, and so is defined by the multiple temporalities of its instruments. The signifying embodiments, signifying materialities, and signifying narratives constitutive of theatre as rhetoric and practice articulate, depend on, and are altered by the changing emergence of a conceptual "human" (or the dispersion of a conceptual "posthuman") inseparable from the technological inscription of its definition and representation. So, too, consensually licensing terms like "the discipline" and "the field" share with their object—particularly with that slippery congeries, the formal study of drama, theatre, and performance—a vivifying multiplicity and mobility, as well as a notable temporal instability. Like theatre, like any technology, the condition of theory, of critique, and of scholarship is a consistent struggle with passing into pastness as the inseparable trailing edge of innovation. On the occasion of the 75th volume of Theatre Journal, this brief essay reflects on the intertwined fortunes of theatre and the fashioning of the "disciplines" of its formal study, their passing implication in mutually-sustaining technologies of cultural representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the prominent theories of cultural studies is cultural materialism, which has its base on the theory of Marxism. Much of the research work done regarding cultural materialism is on Renaissance literature; the development of the theory itself is through the studies conducted on the plays of William Shakespeare, who is one of the epitomes of Renaissance literature. This paper aims to be a unique cultural materialist reading done on a graphic novel based on Kashmir, Indian subcontinent. Kashmir is one of the most desired lands on Earth; it has also been a land of contest right from 1947. This article attempts to explore Malik Sajad’s reflection of the Kashmiri society by analyzing and discussing graphic panels from Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (originally published in 2015) in the light of cultural materialism. Since cultural materialism admits that a text mirrors the socio-cultural and political life of a society; it has been used for interpreting this Kashmir-based graphic novel which is a blend of image and words. This graphic memoir offers a unique narration of the political and societal lives of Kashmiris through the creative deployment of an anthropomorphic metaphor. This study shows how Sajad graphically reflects the dominant ideology and dissident discourses in these panels.

The Ramhormoz Plain and large portions of its northern piedmont are part of modern-day Khuzestan province. A season-long survey was conducted in this region in 2020. During this survey, cultural artifacts were identified and recorded at 36 sites from the Achaemenid period. This identification was based on the pottery seen on the surface. The identification of Achaemenid settlements in the Ramhormoz plain was made possible by taking into account the local pottery of Khuzistan reported from the Tappeh Darough. This study both describes the types of pottery from the Achaemenid period as well as introduces various settlements of this period. Two of the most diagnostic vessel forms of the Achaemenid period in the Ramhormoz collection are carinated bowls and jars with everted rims. Most of the pottery discovered is local, but the overall study of the Achaemenid pottery of the Ramhormoz Plain shows the limited influence of the pottery tradition of the Persians and of northwestern Iran. Pottery traditions of eastern Anatolia and southern Mesopotamia can only be identified to a limited extent in the Ramhormoz Plain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Archaeological Studies / Mutaliat-i Bastanshinasi is the property of University of Tehran 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.)

One of the prominent theories of cultural studies is cultural materialism, which has its base on the theory of Marxism. Much of the research work done regarding cultural materialism is on Renaissance literature; the development of the theory itself is through the studies conducted on the plays of William Shakespeare, who is one of the epitomes of Renaissance literature. This paper aims to be a unique cultural materialist reading done on a graphic novel based on Kashmir, Indian subcontinent. Kashmir is one of the most desired lands on Earth; it has also been a land of contest right from 1947. This article attempts to explore Malik Sajad's reflection of the Kashmiri society by analyzing and discussing graphic panels from Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (originally published in 2015) in the light of cultural materialism. Since cultural materialism admits that a text mirrors the socio-cultural and political life of a society; it has been used for interpreting this Kashmir-based graphic novel which is a blend of image and words. This graphic memoir offers a unique narration of the political and societal lives of Kashmiris through the creative deployment of an anthropomorphic metaphor. This study shows how Sajad graphically reflects the dominant ideology and dissident discourses in these panels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Yüzüncü Yil Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi is the property of Van Yuzuncu Yil University 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.)

At the beginning of the 20th century, the radical paradigm shift in atomic physics and chemistry attracted attention from non-scientific culture, and provided a new set of imagery in literary representation of matter, particularly in popular fiction. The article presents a number of texts whose themes and plots were rooted in a peculiar manner of writing, featuring a radical and consistent projection of emotions and desires onto literary representation of matter. The theoretical background has been derived from recent discus- sion of cultural materialism, and from Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. The selection of literary texts covers popular novels and short stories published in Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1918. The conclusions present a somewhat surprising link between the new developments in atomic theory, and the tradition of frontier settings in the American adventure romance.

Objective: This study aims to investigate the issues related to the formation and persistence of deliberate self-harm behavior in adolescents from Iranian mental health professionals' viewpoints. Methods: The present qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to record the experiences of 9 mental health professionals with work experience in deliberate self-harm behavior in adolescence. The participants were selected via the purposive sampling method. The Sterling content analysis method was used to analyze the transcription of the interviews. Results: The semantic units of the interview were classified into 32 initial codes. The extracted sub-themes were as follows: A rejection of new identities, repression, the disintegration of social identity, materialism, economic poverty, unresolved parental conflicts, the lack of authority, the ambivalency between boundaries and freedom, shame, and guilt, blame, fear of harm, liberation, self-care, escape mechanism, and replacement, affect regulation, coping with self-disintegration and self-esteem, relationship conflicts with adults and peers, identity creation, identity disorder, boundless mental structure, lack of self-confidence, and distorted self-perception. The following four themes were categorized as subcategories of transformational injuries: Traumatic society, vulnerable family, interpersonal impact, and interpersonal effectiveness. Conclusion: Mental health specialists considered deliberate self-harm traumatic; however, they deem it for eliminating negative emotions and controlling the internal and external world of adolescents. Furthermore, they consider this behavior a reaction to cultural conflicts, cultural materialism, and the disintegration of identity and role during adolescence in families not being capable to facilitate low-risk transformation for adolescents because of economic and psychological factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the French mainstreamisation process of web related vocabularies through the lens of a collection of archived fragments from national and regional media outlets. A cultural materialist approach is chosen to question the "naturalisation" of a so-called "web language" (langage web) and highlights the role of mediations which help turn once-marginal "jargon" terms into popular digital keywords. This perspective is explored through a diptych of case studies on the discursive journeys of "Buzz" and "Trolls" (1999–2021) using texts and screenshots from Europresse and Internet Archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a less known region with respect to Islamic pottery, Khusf County was surveyed in 2014 to record its historical relics. The intervening years have seen the publication of a lot of archaeological information on the documented relics, but the corpus of Islamic pottery from the region remains virtually unpublished. Its rich diversity in motif and decoration types and attribution to several different Islamic centuries as well as the fact that there were few published studies from South Khorasan province in general regarding regional Islamic ceramics warranted an independent study. Thus, the present study has the potential to not only shed light on the archeology of Khusf but also contribute to the studies of the related Islamic pottery from the province. With these in mind, the major questions addressed here concern the chronology of the pottery corpus in question and the centers from which comparanda could be drawn. This paper embarks on a comparative analysis of the Islamic pottery assemblages from Khusf County to establish a comparative chronology. The data for this descriptive-comparative study comes from both field and library researches. The findings suggest that the Islamic pottery from the county spans at least the 10th to the 19th century AD. In types of motifs and decoration, the pottery finds parallels over a broad swathe of eastern and southern Iran, and for the most part represents potential imports from such regions or centers as Nishapur, Mashhad, and Kerman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary tourism has recently emerged as a lively field of research, especially in nineteenth-century studies. As a cultural phenomenon it has proved to be particularly popular in the British Isles, where its origins can be traced back to the eighteenth century. This essay analyses literary tourism in relation to one of England’s most renowned authors: Shakespeare. Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee is explored to explain how this well-orchestrated commemorative event paved the way for the earliest pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. Secondly, the Shakespeare family homes, especially the Birthplace, are analysed as historical national icons that have elicited ideas of Englishness. Finally, there is a discussion on authenticity in relation to the Birthplace and The Globe. Using theoretical terminology coined by Lacan and Baudrillard, the essay seeks to demonstrate the inability to fully experience authenticity, as it is impossible to access a reality—Shakespeare’s past—that has ceased to exist.

Copyright of Journal of Philosophy, Culture & Political Science is the property of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University 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.)

Qaisra Shahraz’s A Pair of Jeans and Other Stories (2013) has been a story of a girl named Mariam. Her oscillation between the two worlds stands for the conflict between conventional and modern values. Conflicts arise not just between values but also between generations. One generation may have a harder time accepting new ideas, traditions, laws, and cultures than another. On the other hand, there is a generation that can change with the environment and is adaptable. Cultural materialism is an anthropological research orientation first introduced by Marvin Harris in his 1968 book “The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), as a theoretical paradigm and research strategy. In the preface of his book Cultural Materialism: The struggle for a science of culture (1980) he defines, that cultural materialism is based on one premise and that is human life is affected by the existence of earthly problems”. This paper contains all the necessary components to highlight the two distinct worlds that the protagonist's current generation and his parents' previous generation once lived in. The nature of this study is qualitative. The method of inquiry known as qualitative research aims to comprehend the essence of its subjects. Instead of seeking to gather and evaluate objective facts, qualitative research explores subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi 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.)

This paper presents a diversity of overlapping terms under the broad area of Cultural Studies like 'culture studies', ‘cultural criticism’, and 'cultural materialism'. Through a descriptive analytical method, this study aims to show how culture operates by significant communicative codes in multicultural settings that humans learn from cradle to grave, acquiring cultural traditions, customs, and social roles. As a discipline and a school of criticism, Cultural Studies has changed the way of the study of literature. Those practiced cultural codes of religious rituals, daily activities, experiences, among others, have become the primary knowledge and recorded parts of the history of a particular society. It depicts a clear picture of how the knowledge of cultural codes and their social functions enable individuals to perceive culture and literature comprehensively and make a systematized reference to the culture of that particular society. It shows the development of Cultural Studies, late last century, laying its foundations to be accepted in the academic field, which paved the way for literary works to be reconstructed, re-appreciated, and reassigned in reference to their cultural field. This paper attempts to answer some questions about Cultural Studies and whether it can help us explore the functions of cultural products in a society or a literary work. It provides examples of some cultural codes and how they help us read and identify an individual regionally, socially, economically, and religiously. The Conclusion stresses on readers, critics and translators to be aware of the cultural codes when dealing with, reading of or translating from other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth has had a considerable number of screen adaptations. The legendary Scottish thane has been since played by many actors as diverse in their portrayal as the adaptations themselves have been diverse in their contextualization of the plot and accentuation of certain aspects of the originals. Mark Brozel’s adaptation follows a contemporary perspective on Macbeth, removed from the medieval Scottish realm to a three star Michelin restaurant. The adaptation thus substitutes the title role of a blood-thirsty warrior into that of a no less ambitious masterchef. In this manner, Brozel’s adaptation tackles the issues Shakespeare addressed centuries ago albeit in the context of the 21st century. These issues examine the interplay of power and fate. Brozel problematises the classical play from our contemporary viewpoint. Issues of bloodshed, motherhood, ambition, waste, and alienation intertwine into a general defamiliorization of reality. The cultural-materialist interpretative approach to this work has proven as the most appropriate key to comparatively reflect on the original and Brozel’s adaptation, as it emphasizes Shakespeare’s modus operandi (thanks to which Macbeth so intensely lives to his present day) that makes it impossible to separate the narrative away from its sociopolitical context.

This study employed a cultural materialist framework to examine organizational culture through the analysis of discourse at the National Communications Authority in Ghana (NCA-Ghana), the state-sanctioned regulator of the communications industry in the country. The study explored the interconnections among neoliberalism, colonialism, and organizational culture through an examination of discourses of professionalism and individualization. Using the discourse historical approach (DHA), the study found that neoliberalism functions in corporatized African organizations by activating colonial logics which in turn influence organizational culture. An important implication of the study is that, even for the individual, organizational culture is not merely symbolic but has material consequences. Because of these consequences, resistance efforts may not always look different from practices that reproduce dominant discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, an authority with certain rules has governed all societies, and each authority has had different impacts on society. Since theatre is a reflection of society and culture, it carries the traces of the development and changes of political and ideological concepts over time. With the emergence of playwrights such as Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and Martin Crimp in the British political theatre after the 1970s, the stagnation of British theatre during the Thatcher period has begun to end. The purpose of this article is to explore the interconnection between the political and social changes of the period through the lens of Martin Crimp's play Dealing with Clair (1988). Moreover, in the light of cultural materialist critics (e.g. Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, and Raymond Williams), it will put forth Crimp's perspective against power ideologies in the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the fictional transpositions of a traumatic event in recent Romanian history in some contemporary novels by women writers. Decree 770/1966 meant the brutal intervention of the paternalistic state in the private lives of its citizens and the redefinition of gender roles to the effect of translating reproductive roles into productive ones. The theme of abortion is analysed from the theoretical perspective of new historicism and cultural materialism and through a feminine and feminist lens in a number of works published by Romanian contemporary women authors in the past few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the 20th century, the radical paradigm shift in atomic physics and chemistry attracted attention from non-scientific culture, and provided a new set of imagery in literary representation of matter, particularly in popular fiction. The article presents a number of texts whose themes and plots were rooted in a peculiar manner of writing, featuring a radical and consistent projection of emotions and desires onto literary representation of matter. The theoretical background has been derived from recent discussion of cultural materialism, and from Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. The selection of literary texts covers popular novels and short stories published in Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1918. The conclusions present a somewhat surprising link between the new developments in atomic theory, and the tradition of frontier settings in the American adventure romance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short essay seeks to restore the keywords approach initiated by Williams to a more central place within the cultural materialist paradigm he also developed. Combining Williams' cultural materialist account of language with the practical orientation of Keywords, it sketches a way of developing the keywords approach as a method of sociocultural analysis. Drawing on some practical examples, it offers 'keywords-as-method' as a means of carrying out a historicist and materialist study of the relationship of linguistic to social change, that goes beyond the simple glossary of terms approach that has thus far limited the explanatory and critical potential of Keywords. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the renewal of Williamsian scholarship that has coincided with the centenary of his birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, several excavations that have been performed in the Fars Neolithic sites have resulted in the presentation of different chronologies for the region. Most of the research in Fars centered on the Kur River Basin (KRB). Fars has always had a different environment for the formation of different cultures over time, therefore, in order to reach a better understanding of the prehistoric cultures of the region it is necessary to make a brief review of the geographical zones of the plains and valleys of Fars province. Taking into account the existence of several questions and ambiguities regarding Neolithic Fars, the Hormangan site, located in the Bavant River Basin, was excavated. During the excavation, two settlement phases were identified that contained cultural materials relatively comparable to Tol-e Mushki, Tol-e Jari B, Kushk Hezar, and Rahmat Abad sequences. The goal of this paper is to explore the absolute chronology of the Hormangan site as well as other Neolithic sites located in the northern half of the Fars region with a special reference to the local cultural and technological sides of different Neolithic sites throughout the region. Bearing in mind the similarities of Bashi materials with Hormangan, Rahmat Abad, and Mushki regions and the absolute chronology of these regions, consideration of Bashi phase does not seem logical. Therefore, by comparing the cultural materials and absolute chronology done in other regions, a sequence chronology including Rahmat Abad (7500–7000 BC), formative Mushki (7000–6400 BC), Mushki (6400–6000 BC), Jari (6000–5600 BC), and Shams Abad (5600–5200 BC) for the Neolithic period of Fars can be presented. According to the excavation of Rahmatabad and Tal-e Sangi, it seems that Fars was inhabited in the middle of the 8th millennium BC and the Neolithic package entered this area, and there is no evidence of the Neolithization process. In the past, the Mushaki period was introduced as the oldest pottery Neolithic period, but with new excavations, it seems that the use of pottery had become common in Fars, as in many parts of Southwest Asia, around 7000 BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diarization of the self emerged through historically contingent social and economic relations and the practice of accounting as an integral aspect of industrialization and capitalism. From the journal to new media technologies, the recording of everyday life is about the governance and construction of the self, illuminating the 'everyday' as a salient dimension of sense-making in relation to the wider world. Accounting the self today has gained renewed prominence through new media technologies and social media platforms and its increasing incorporation into everyday life, inviting a public interface. The teleology of older forms of accounting the self (i.e. the journal) to new media technologies needs to be seen through a continuum in which sociocultural and economic forces enmesh with the medium of communication as a tool of self-expression to capture the self in its diurnal mode. This article utilizes Raymond Williams' notion of cultural materialism, in linking the diary as a modern technology of self-expression with vlogs in the post-digital terrain wherein material practices shed light onto our lifeworlds construed through the resources available within material and immaterial infrastructures, offering both agency and abstraction by capital. As such, the manifest cultural form is intimately mediated by cultural technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) explores gender relations which were fiercely debated in the late nineteenth century. The play deals mainly with the oppression of a bourgeois woman named Nora, who forges her father’s signature to save her husband’s life. Regarded as a member of the inferior sex, Nora is dominated by her patriarchal-minded husband Helmer. As she lacks socio-economic freedom to earn her own money, she is forced to obey the will of her husband, who imprisons her in the domestic sphere where she is degraded as an ignorant, inferior being who needs intellectual and moral guidance. Moreover, Helmer manipulates his position as a wage earner and treats Nora as an object that is to be possessed and controlled. Since Helmer benefits from his ‘superiority’ in terms of his gender and economic position, he represents both a domineering patriarch and a manipulative capitalist master. However, Nora is not depicted as a passive receiver of male domination for she develops counter discourses against her husband’s patriarchal discourses which focus on the inferiority of the female sex. Frustrated with the dominant moral and legal discourses of patriarchy that despise women, Nora decides to move from the restrictive domestic world to the outside world of power, money, and business. Her removal from the domestic sphere where she is expected to perform certain normative roles associated with the female sex is important in that it heralds women’s emancipation from male domination. The present study examines A Doll’s House from a cultural materialist perspective to argue that Nora’s departure from her husband’s house is not only a personal experience but a social challenge against the dominant patriarchal capitalist culture.

This paper examines the notions of Shiʿism and kingship in Safavid cultural materials (coins, architectural inscriptions, enthronement orations, and panegyrics) to trace the role of Safavid ideology in the dynasty's transformation from a Sufi order into a monarchic institution with a sectarian identity. It examines these materials in order to reconstruct the dominant ideology of the Safavids in various venues. Examination of the ideologies of Safavid rulership shows a marked difference between ideologies expressed in these cultural mediums. We argue that this difference points to a multi-pronged Safavid strategy of projecting political legitimacy in distinct registers for different audiences. By combining ideologies that were embraced and practiced by people of different regions and sects in the Persian empire before the Safavids, the Safavid monarchs managed to spread widely their power within the empire and beyond, to change the religio-political ideology of the empire, and to remain in power for more than two centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the scientific (Solovyev, Banac, Bešlagić, Venzel, and others), encyclopedic and essayistic (Krleža), and literary works (Dizdar, Nogo) regarding medieval stećci monuments formed a co-text of stećci within which a narrative of their Bogomil identity was created. This identity, as a factor of political and ideological power, was the most prominent factor of the co-text of stećci in Yugoslavia in the second half of the 20th century and the decades after its demise. Our attention is directed to the potential ambivalence of that co-text and the conflicts within it, but most of all to the analysis of the role of literary works in creation of that context and thus in the creation of the historical reality depicted. Due to the thematic focus of this co-text on the Middle Ages, the neo-medieval perspective on the world (Berdyaev), along with other "dissident" texts, are utilized as tools to poetically deconstruct the narrative that corresponds to the position of ideological power and open the co-text of stećci to the Byzantine and Orthodox cultural realms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the cultural materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicization of the idea of identity, with a view to clarifying and resolving some of the issues animating the 'identity politics' debates currently dividing left academia and activism. First, it offers clarity on the concept 'identity politics', demonstrating that we should reserve the term to refer only to politics that mobilize specifically and meaningfully around the concept of identity. Second, and in virtue of this, it provides new insights into five central questions that have driven the identity politics debates: Do identity politics always tend towards essentialism?; Do identity politics inevitably promote a politics of recognition over redistribution?; Do identity politics inevitably create political cleavages rather than solidaristic forms of political action?; What is the relationship between 'identity politics' and 'call-out culture'?; And, are the problems of identity politics resolved by reference to intersectionality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]