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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
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The impact of Thatcherism in popular culture
More LessAbstractMargaret Thatcher’s (1925–2013) remarkable legacy marks a period of profound change in British history. As the longest serving and only female British prime minister of the twentieth century she held eleven and a half years of continuous power in office. Following her first electoral victory in May 1979, she won a further two elections for the Conservative Party until her deposition in November 1990. The radical social and economic reform that she designed and delivered as prime minister literally turned the Conservative Party and the country on its head. However, many were discontent with the perceived imbalance and wide devastation that her policies impaled on the country; being further aggrieved by her unsympathetic nature towards others. While politicians voiced their protests in parliament, others were left to find alternative ways to communicate their discontent. Professional artists were accompanied by the public in harnessing the power of aesthetic and acoustic media in popular culture to voice their discontent to the masses. This article explores the influence that Thatcher’s policies had in popular culture including British cinema, the arts and music in her time as prime minster and beyond.
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Lausanne-Zagreb via Berlin, or heading for an unforeseen Europeanness
More LessAbstractThis article discusses the Eurovision Song Contest and focuses on the two editions of the event immediately before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, i.e. the 1989 contest that was held in Lausanne and the 1990 contest in Zagreb. It attempts to figure out the different kinds of Europeanness that were outlined on the Eurovision stage before the remapping of Europe during the early 1990s. Reading closely the conformist and narcissistic Eurocentrism of the 1989 contest, as well as the touristic and sometimes patronizing attitude vis-à-vis Europe of the 1990 contest, it spells out some ways in which an emblematic televised show understood its own political dimension and reacted to the emerging realities.
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James Bond: International man of gastronomy?
More LessAbstractThis article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. In particular, it examines how the author uses Bond’s culinary knowledge and habits of consumption as an important constituent of his hero’s character. Similarly, the food choices of other characters, notably villains, are shown to be linked, by Fleming, to core aspects of their identity - principally their ethnicity. Bond’s impulse to observe and classify, very much in evidence in the novels’ food sequences, is examined in terms of the texts’ construction of Bond as a skilled identifier of signs.
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The bibliografting of Montolieu, village du Livre des Arts Graphiques
More LessAbstractIn 2010, Montolieu, France celebrated its twentieth anniversary as Montolieu, village du livre et des Arts Graphiques. Within two decades, this town of under 800 residents has witnessed significant economic, cultural, demographic and physical changes that have transformed it from a victim of rural exodus to an increasingly important cultural centre and tourist destination, as well as a desirable location for purchasing second residences. I begin this article by examining the conditions that prompted the rural town’s decision to adopt a new identity based on literary and print culture. I contextualize the development of this village du livre within a growing European book town trend and within a larger French fascination with literature, literary culture and literacy. I next investigate the tensions and challenges that arose in the community as the project began taking shape. Finally, I analyse how the adoption of a new identity has affected the town’s social and physical make-up, especially as evident in three local lieux de mémoire: the Musée Michel Braibant, the Manufacture Royale and the Coopérative, Centre d’Art et de Littérature.
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‘Fatalitas!’ the criminal body in Belle Epoque crime serials: The strange case of Chéri-Bibi
More LessAbstractLate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criminology and criminalistics were preoccupied with the criminal body, and Belle Epoque crime fiction refracts this concern through its focus on the body as a site of identity formation. This article examines this problematic through the optic of Gaston Leroux’s Chéri-Bibi serial. It argues that the text engages a number of different discourses of corporeality, reformulating the grotesque body of carnival (as theorized by Bakhtin) in the light of contemporary developments in criminology, where the followers of Lombroso saw criminality as physiologically determined, and surgery, where Alexis Carrel’s experiments in transplantation opened up the possibility of creating hybrid bodies, assembled out of bits and pieces of other bodies, and visceral organisms, bodies without brains. Leroux’s text constellates these different conceptions of corporeality to produce an image of the modern grotesque in the form of a body that is resistant to identification, a resistance that is profoundly ambivalent, for if it provokes anxieties surrounding the loss of identity, it also opens up endless narrative possibilities.
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Reviews
Authors: Michael Murphy and Liam O’CallaghanAbstractMorrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities, Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power (eds) (2011) Bristol: Intellect, 342 pp., ISBN: 9781841504179, h/bk £29.95
Sport, Representation and Evolving Identities in Europe, Philip Dine and Sean Crosson (eds) (2010) Bern: Peter Lang, 369 pp., ISBN: 978-3-03911-977-6, p/bk, €54.40
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