Television historical dramas take on a number of different modes, which inflect how they are interpreted. The Gothic mode, signalled in part by aesthetics and a focus on trauma, encourages audiences to engage with the past as a place of horror and darkness. Through intentional anachronism and the presentation of contemporary parallels, these…[Read more]

Hammering, loud peals of thunder had startled me into consciousness. As a young child of six, the storm had roused me from the comfortable oblivion of my deep sleep. The booming rolls of thunder had woken my father as well. His head peered from behind the door. Finding me awake, we went onto the porch of our summer cottage, which was perched high…[Read more]

Functions of Religion
1. Fear of the unknown Fear of the unknown is a popular theory. The philosopher David Hume, the anthropologist Malinowski, and Einstein all emphasize the role of anxiety – or fear.
2. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object, is another favorite theory. Xenophanes (…[Read more]

“Ideal theorists” in contemporary liberal political theory argue that we can only arrive at a conception of what our most important political values require by reference to an imagined ideal state of affairs and that we must therefore, to some extent, engage in utopian thinking. Critical theorists, from Marx and the Frankfurt School, have tra…[Read more]

As a theoretical paradigm is a very natural and common-sense, idea-model – an idea or paradigm of a human being that is easily grasped model-idea. It is not surprisingly, then, that the Body-Mind-Spirit Paradigm appeared very early in human history.

The Ho’omana religion actually recognizes three different types or levels of “spirit,” which…[Read more]

The aesthetics of early feature-film scores were shaped by narrational problems introduced by multi-reel features and their longer durations. Using The Patchwork Girl of Oz, I show how stylistic devices like silences and musical pun- ctuation were used to address the coherence and pacing of multi-reel storytelling.

This article details the historical factors that shaped Hollywood’s adoption of magnetic recording during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It draws upon economic theories of technological change, archival correspondence, technical records, analyses of postproduction workflows, and delineations of the structural constraints that limited how the f…[Read more]

This chapter investigates how the introduction of stereo complicated Hollywood’s vococentric practices. It also reveals how sound technicians developed mixing techniques that preserved the salience of dialogue in multi-channel soundscapes. The author refers to such techniques as monocentrism and illustrates monocentric norms by analyzing the c…[Read more]

Alexa Alice Joubin’s entry expands the global scope of The Chaucer Encyclopedia (4 vols). This entry, in Volume 3, examines the work by the Chinese translator Lin Shu’s (1852-1924). Lin translated and rewrote several key stories from the Canterbury Tales. Joubin argues that Lin’s works exemplify early twentieth-century Chinese imaginaries of medie…[Read more]

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Madrid-based Galician journalist Julio Camba (1882–1962) acquired long-lasting fame as a travel writer thanks to his foreign chronicles published in the Spanish press and subsequently compiled in a series of volumes. La rana viajera [The Travelling Frog] (1920), however, gathers some of the p…[Read more]

Travel has always been an extremely important theme in Irish-language literature, but often this travel was motivated by financial hardship and, up until the late twentieth century, Irish-language accounts of travel largely documented the emigrant experience. In more recent years, however, Irish-language literature has witnessed a transition from…[Read more]

Guidebooks play an important role in increasing the visibility of a nation, as they introduce the country to potential visitors and create images prior to travelling. However, they also tend to reinforce stereotypes and create “romantic fictions” (Mahn 2008). This article examines the representation of Wales in French and German guidebooks and con…[Read more]

In spite of a burgeoning recognition of the Welsh language as part of a wider appreciation of Welsh culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century (see Constantine 2014: 124), Home Tour writing about Wales remained largely Anglocentric (Borm, quoted in Colbert 2012: 85). The journals written by lady’s companions, Eliza and Millicent Bant, in 1…[Read more]

Perhaps the most incredible case Edgar Cayce ever encountered was the case of the Dietrich child. In fact, because newspapers did publish the remarkable story of the Dietrich child, Edgar Cayce immediately became a sensation. In 1902, Cayce had just begun to gain a reputation as a healer. Aimee Dietrich was a six-year-old child who had become…[Read more]

Without fail a study in any depth of our fondness for music must eventually address the issue of consonance and dissonance. Past approaches to this issue have been bounded by a limited knowledge base and, further, marred by logical flaws, occasional hand waving, and the myopia of reductionism. Despite the explosion of progress in the last few…[Read more]

Kenneth Pargament vigorously argues that, “There is a deeper dimension to our problems. Illness, accident, interpersonal conflicts, divorce, layoffs, and death are more than “significant life events.” They raise profound and disturbing questions about our place and purpose in the world, they point to the limits of and underscore our finitude.” (p.…[Read more]

This dissertation explores metamodernism in contemporary culture, focusing on its manifestation in literature and its intersections with vaporwave and the music of Radiohead. It considers the novel Taipei by Tao Lin as a representation of metamodern sensibility, analysing its portrayal of a human subjectivity navigating a world shaped by…[Read more]

La personalidad y la obra de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557), reputado cronista y genealogista, de vocación novelista, pionero científico naturista y aprendiz de poeta, han sufrido diversos vaivenes historiográficos que, al menos en opinión de quien suscribe, le han privado en la actualidad del reconocimiento que se merece. Ferná…[Read more]

De entre las muchas y generosas lecciones que el maestro don Julio Valdeón ha brindado al medievalismo hispánico destacaremos aquella que fundamentará las páginas siguientes: la importancia de la propaganda ideológica favorable a la dinastía Trastámara durante la guerra civil castellana entre los años 1366 y 1371. Este conflicto fratric…[Read more]