Tomasz Dobrogoszcz - Böcker

This Element traces the origins and earliest manifestations of gender bias in the English language. The analysis is based on a corpus of Old English prose texts, written between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The results are interpreted in the historical, cultural and literary context of Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Europe. The investigation shows a significant difference in the way women and men are presented in Old English texts, with the former clearly associated with family life, portrayed in the context of their physical appearance, marriage and childbearing, rarely involved in meaningful activities and presented as possessions of their male relatives. Situating the linguistic representations of women in the context of Christianity, the Element demonstrates that late Old English can be seen as a vehicle of language bias that will establish male domination for centuries to come. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element traces the origins and earliest manifestations of gender bias in the English language. The analysis is based on a corpus of Old English prose texts, written between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The results are interpreted in the historical, cultural and literary context of Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Europe. The investigation shows a significant difference in the way women and men are presented in Old English texts, with the former clearly associated with family life, portrayed in the context of their physical appearance, marriage and childbearing, rarely involved in meaningful activities and presented as possessions of their male relatives. Situating the linguistic representations of women in the context of Christianity, the Element demonstrates that late Old English can be seen as a vehicle of language bias that will establish male domination for centuries to come. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus was one of the most important and influential cultural phenomena of the 1970s. The British program was followed by albums, stage appearances, and several films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian,and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. In all, the comic troupe drew on a variety of cultural references that prominently figured in their sketches, and they tackled weighty matters that nonetheless amused their audiences.In Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition:Cultural Contexts in Monty Python, Tomasz Dobrogoszcz presents essays that explore the various touchstones in the television show and subsequent films. These essays look at a variety of themes prompted by the comic geniuses:Death The depiction of womenShakespearean influences British and American cultural representationsReactions from foreign viewers This volume offers a distinguished discussion of Monty Python’s oeuvre, exhibiting highly varied approaches from a number of perspectives, including gender studies, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Featuring a foreword by Python alum Terry Jones, Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition will appeal to anyone interested in cultural history and media studies, as well as the general fans of Monty Python who want to know more about the impact of this groundbreaking group.

The book provides a lucid analysis of all Ian McEwan fiction published to date, from his 1975 debut short stories up to the 2016 novel Nutshell, spanning forty years of his literary career. Apart from a general discussion of McEwan’s works, the study offers a uniform focal point: it concentrates on one of the key issues taken up by the writer – the aspect of relationships between partners and between family members. As the book demonstrates, the novelist employs interpersonal relations to establish a pertinent context in which he can dramatically portray the process of identity formation in his characters. Throughout his fiction, McEwan consistently uses references to psychoanalysis, either veiled or direct. The proposed book investigates the novelist’s oeuvre through the lens of the psychoanalytic theory developed by Jacques Lacan. The approach used makes the book useful both for readers well familiar with this apparatus, and for those who need introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis and such of his concepts as “desire,” “fantasy,” “the symbolic order” or “ the Name-of-the-Father.”

This collection of essays on Graham Swift’s fiction brings together the perspectives of renowned Swift scholars from around the world. Authors look at the swift’s oeuvre from different interpretative angles, combining a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This book covers all of Swift’s fiction, including his novels and short stories; special emphasis, however, is on his most recent books. By approaching Swift’s work from a number of perspectives, the volume offers a synthetic overview of his literary output. In particular, it searches for thematic and formal continuities between his early and more recent fiction, and attempts to emphasize its new developments and interests.

This open access book illustrates how intertextuality in music videos can be used to create new aesthetic patterns and develop a political agenda.In an age when most people are immersed in popular culture, music videos often bridge the gap between readily accessible and more demanding artistic forms. Music videos can sensitize the audience to various eminent themes, motifs, and artistic conventions by means of transferring them into a familiar medium. The efficacy of this process is enhanced through the use of intertextual references to other culture products, whereby meanings are conveyed in a highly condensed form. At the same time, intertexts connected with particular art forms can undergo significant revisions through the cultural context in which a new music video is produced: the amalgam of word, sound and image initiates innovative readings of familiar motifs, and transforms the understanding of literature, music, film, and fine arts. Located at the intersection of different semiotic systems, music videos can juxtapose notions from contrasting areas – folk culture, myth, politics, psychology, aesthetics – in unconventional ways. Authored by a group of international scholars, implementing various conceptual approaches, and analyzing an original selection of artists, this collection of essays examines music videos as an innovative transmedial practice which employs intertextuality both to create new aesthetic patterns and to develop a political agenda. The book views creative intertextuality as a token of the hybrid nature of present-day audio-visual popular culture and contemporary (post)human subjectivity in general.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.