This chapter seeks to reflect on the concepts of entertainment, engagement, and poetics applied to cinematic art and it inscribes this set of reflections within the scope of aesthetic authenticity in cinema. The discussion is structured around the question of the autonomy of art, understood as a kind of characterization or requirement, a topic…[Read more]

This paper presents some of the ideas central to my current developing research into the modes of historical television drama, particularly the Gothic mode. In focusing on the 2018 television adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the paper illustrates the idea of the Gothic mode in operation, considering its relationship to notions of historical…[Read more]

This article explores the co-constitution of networks and infrastructure in the context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. We consider Maria Edgeworth’s conceptualization of the term network with and alongside infrastructure in her Harry and Lucy stories (1801–25) and offer an analysis of a manuscript tour by Mary Anne Eade fro…[Read more]

From 40 years of experience it is clear that spirituality has become entangled in abstractions: powers, perfection, supernatural, unreal, limitless knowledge, crystal ball perceptions, etc.
Dr Stephen Farra agreed with that – and went one better. Dr Farra stated “Our models are out reality. But our models are not reality. That coincides with the…[Read more]

This chapter examines the relationship between American Westerns and Brazilian Nordesterns, films set in the arid northeastern region known as the sertão. US cultural and economic imperialism, in Brazil and throughout Latin America, is both cause and effect of persistent underdevelopment. The northward flow of natural resources has long been…[Read more]

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama’s affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which con…[Read more]

Desde que el hispanista francés Félix Lecoy llamase en 1938 la atención sobre las
peculiaridades de los papeles atribuidos a las mujeres en la obra de Juan Ruiz, numerosos
trabajos académicos se han dedicado a esclarecer en lo posible las coordenadas históricas
y literarias de esta presencia femenina en el Libro de buen amor, sobre todo en lo r…[Read more]