Bücher der Reihe Politics, Literature, & Film

This book places early modern philosophy and political theory into conversation with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing on magic: plays, spell books, treatises, and witch trial narratives. Reading works by Hobbes and Bacon alongside writing by necromancers and witch-hunters reveals a broad cultural obsession with supernatural power.

';As to Europekeep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog.'Ayn Rand (19051982) thus commented on the role of Europe in her key novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The same could be said of the way Europe features in her own biography and in the general perception of her persona. Even though Rand was born in pre-revolutionary Russia, she is nowadays considered anAmerican phenomenon, whose reach ends at the Atlantic shore. This book lifts the gray fog cast over her relationship with Europe, retracing the changing perception of the continent in both her fiction and thought. Her apparent lack of success with European readers is often explained by allegedly different reading tastes. However, a look at her publication history and reception shows that many factors played a role why her work found fewer European than US readers. Finally, an archipelago of European readers and admirers emerges which is testament to Rands impact on European art and politics.

In 1837, a small group of rebels proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Canada. Between then and the Act of Confederation of 1867, colonial Canadians tried to imagine the future of their communities in North America. The choice between monarchy and republicanism shaped both colonial self-images and images of the United States; it also drove the political deliberations that eventually united the colonies of British North America into a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown. Between Empire and Republic is a thematic exploration of the political discourse embedded in the literary output of the period. Colonial authors Susanna Moodie, Th. Ch. Haliburton, and John Richardson enjoyed transatlantic popularity and explained colonial realities to their British, Canadian, and American readership. Collectively, their writings serve as the lens into colonial Canadian perceptions of American and British political ideas and institutions. Between Empire and Republic discusses North America as a literary contact zone where British principles of constitutional monarchy competed with American ideas of republicanism and democratic self-government. The author argues that political ideas in pre-Confederation Canada filtered into the literary works of the time, creating two settler-colonial communities whose recognizable cultural characteristics echoed public attitudes towards the political projects underpinning them.

Danoff argues that novels and films with an ambiguous, nuanced, and tragic outlook help teach citizen-readers how to think through the moral complexities of political issues on which they must render judgment. He claims that some of the most profound American thinking about the nature of democratic leadership has come through works of fiction.

Defenses Against the Dark Arts argues that performances of magic in Harry Potter show us how to leap into political action, from high politics of governments and elections to everyday politics of private lives and popular cultures. It features learning to face and defend against dark arts in dark times.

Inspired and in honor of the work of noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols, the essays in this volume explore political ideas and implications in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and film from classical antiquity to the present day, creating an interdisciplinary conversation across genres.

This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. Drawing upon the existential insights of Baudelaire it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics, and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure.

This book provides an analysis of five of the best known comedies of the award winning American film makers Joel and Ethan Coen. It demonstrates that their films, while popular and entertaining, also contain substantial philosophic and political ideas, particularly focusing on the nature of liberal democracy.

The authors of this volume explore the Bard's dramatization of perennial questions about human nature, moral virtue, and statesmanship. Reading his plays as works of philosophical literature enhances our understanding of political life and provides a source of advice and inspiration for the citizens and statesmen of today and tomorrow.

It's hard to imagine the American dream without American road trips. This book takes readers on a journey through American road trip stories, revealing that they involve more than mere escapism-that they are an important and long-neglected source of American political thought.

This book examines politics in terms of space fiction, international relations and theory, using the Star Wars and Star Trek television and movie franchises to illustrate these dimensions.

Flannery O'Connor's fiction continues to haunt American readers, in part because of its uncanny ability to remind us who we are and what we need. This book reveals the extent to which O'Connor was a serious reader of the history of political philosophy and why O'Connor feared that the habit to govern by tenderness would lead to terror.

How does Game of Thrones mirror international politics and how may the series provide a useful tool for better understanding the theories of international relations? This book connects international relations theories to the series, providing examples from characters whose actions reflect applied scenarios of decision-making and strategy.

The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film provides an exploration of the relationship between modern technological progress and classical liberalism. Each chapter provides a detailed analysis of a film or novel, including Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Michael Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. These works of fiction are examined through the lens of political thinkers ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt. The compatibility of classical liberalism and technology is questioned, using fiction as a window into Western society's views on politics, economics, religion, technology, and the family. This project explores the intersection between human nature and creation, particularly artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, using works of literature and film to access cultural concerns. Each of the works featured asks a question about the relationship between technology and creation. Technology also allows humanity to create new types of life in the forms of artificial intelligence and genetically engineered beings. This book studies works of literature and film as evidence of the contemporary unease with the progress of technology and its effect on the political realm.

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters argues that Huxley is not a man of letters engaged in politics, but a political thinker who chooses literature to spread his ideas. His preference for the dystopian genre is due to his belief in the tremendous impact of dystopia on twentieth-century political thought. His political thinking is not systematic, but this does not stop his analysis from supplying elements that are original and up-to-date, and that represent fascinating contributions of political theory in all the spheres that he examines from anti-Marxism to anti-positivism, from political realism to elitism, from criticism of mass society to criticism of totalitarianism, from criticism of ideologies to the future of liberal democracy, from pacifism to ecological communitarianism.Huxley clearly grasped the unsolved issues of contemporary liberalism, and the importance of his influence on many twentieth-century and present-day political thinkers ensures that his ideas remain indispensable in the current liberal-democratic debate. Brave New World is without doubt Huxley's most successful political manifesto. While examining the impassioned struggle for the development of all human potentialities, it yet manages not to close the doors definitively on the rebirth of utopia in the age of dystopia.

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

To understand the movements of democratic society one must appreciate fictional narratives and not depend on rationalistic argumentation and scientific analyses. This book examines the effects of storytelling in democratic culture and political life, as it articulates our aspirations, communicates our fears, and criticizes our reality.

This book consists of short essays on approximately fifty American political films. It explores the extent to which films take on the political issues of the day and their influence on public perceptions of politics.

Lights, Camera, Execution! engages in detailed critical analysis of nine different films about capital punishment in the United States. It examines well-known movies from the last thirty years; explores the cinematic techniques used; and identifies common themes such as race and human dignity.

Updike & Politics presents the first collection of essays devoted to the political aspects of Updike's work and showcases a variety of international perspectives.

The strange and wonderful place of Twin Peaks captivated audiences for more than two decades before its long-awaited return to television in 2017. In this edited collection, the authors approach Twin Peaks from a variety of perspectives with the concept of the political at its center.

The authors of this volume explore the Bard's dramatization of perennial questions about human nature, moral virtue, and statesmanship. Reading his plays as works of philosophical literature enhances our understanding of political life and provides a source of advice and inspiration for the citizens and statesmen of today and tomorrow.

This book examines conceptions of human nature and how such ideas impact the political arrangements in the works ofThomas More, Edward Bellamy, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. By teasing out the underlying conceptions of human nature in these novels, this book links the ontology of their works directly to their political prescriptions.

Cowboy Politics uses key works of literature, film, and television to explore how westerns address political challenges of Western civilization. This book tracks how westerns supplement liberal politics with republican, populist, perfectionist, and environmentalist politics.

Sinclair Lewis was one of the most astute observers of American social and political life. Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy is a highly readable analysis of his novels. The book examines each of Lewis's novels on key themes in the history of political thought and democracy including freedom and purpose, success and materialism, and nationalism and race. Lewis is revealed to be an unapologetic individualist and a fierce humanitarian.

This book demonstrates how government bureaucracy is portrayed in the top ten box office grossing films from 2000-2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, government is generally portrayed poorly, but individual government bureaucrats are typically depicted positively.

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare's political outlook by comparing some of the playwright's best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccol Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ';between' these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright's work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare's corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodiescaring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare's plays that illuminate the playwright's major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.