Devotional Fanscapes

Devotional Fanscapes

Author: Shalini Kakar

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-01-09

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1793646287

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Devotional Fanscapes examines the practices and materiality of fans who worship film stars as divine figures. This book is an analysis of visual culture and star temples that bring cinema, fandom, religion, and politics into undocumented negotiations in national and transnational contexts.


Why Harry Met Sally

Why Harry Met Sally

Author: Joshua Louis Moss

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-07-18

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1477312838

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Explicating one of the most potent and recurring mass-culture fantasies, this book explores Jewish-Christian couplings across a century of popular American literature, theater, film, and television.


Haunted

Haunted

Author: Leo Braudy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0300203802

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Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 Shaping Fear -- 2 Between Hope and Fear: Horror and Religion -- 3 Terror, Horror, and the Cult of Nature -- 4 Frankenstein, Robots, and Androids: Horror and the Manufactured Monster -- 5 The Detective's Reason -- 6 Jekyll and Hyde: The Monster from Within -- 7 Dracula and the Haunted Present -- 8 Horror in the Age of Visual Reproduction -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z -- Illustrations


Movies and Midrash

Movies and Midrash

Author: Wendy I. Zierler

Publisher: Suny Press

Published: 2018-01-02

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9781438466149

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Brings popular cinema and Jewish religious texts into a meaningful dialogue.


Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg

Author: Molly Haskell

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-03

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0300189826

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A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades-long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented Everything about me is in my films, Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg s works for the light they shine upon the man himself. Through such powerhouse hits as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones, to lesser-known masterworks like A.I. and Empire of the Sun, to the haunting Schindler s List, Haskell shows how Spielberg s uniquely evocative filmmaking and story-telling reveal the many ways in which his life, work, and times are entwined. Organizing chapters around specific films, the distinguished critic discusses how Spielberg s childhood in non-Jewish suburbs, his parents traumatic divorce, his return to Judaism upon his son s birth, and other events echo in his work. She offers a brilliant portrait of the extraordinary director a fearful boy living through his imagination who grew into a man whose openness, generosity of spirit, and creativity have enchanted audiences for more than 40 years.


The Paranormal and Popular Culture

The Paranormal and Popular Culture

Author: Darryl Caterine

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-02-18

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1351731815

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Interest in preternatural and supernatural themes has revitalized the Gothic tale, renewed explorations of psychic powers and given rise to a host of social and religious movements based upon claims of the fantastical. And yet, in spite of this widespread enthusiasm, the academic world has been slow to study this development. This volume rectifies this gap in current scholarship by serving as an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of the paranormal to the artefacts of mass media (e.g. novels, comic books, and films) as well as the cultural practices they inspire. After an introduction analyzing the paranormal’s relationship to religion and entertainment, the book presents essays exploring its spiritual significance in a postmodern society; its (post)modern representation in literature and film; and its embodiment in a number of contemporary cultural practices. Contributors from a number of discplines and cultural contexts address issues such as the shamanistic aspects of Batman and lesbianism in vampire mythology. Covering many aspects of the paranormal and its effect on popular culture, this book is an important statement in the field. As such, it will be of utmost interest to scholars of religious studies as well as media, communication, and cultural studies.


Keshab

Keshab

Author: John Stevens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 019093493X

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Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-84) was one of the most powerful and controversial figures in nineteenth-century Bengal. A religious leader and social reformer, his universalist interpretation of Hinduism found mass appeal in India, and generated considerable interest in Britain. His ideas on British imperial rule, religion and spirituality, global history, universalism and modernity were all influential, and his visit to England made him a celebrity. Many Britons regarded him as a prophet of world-historical significance. Keshab was the subject of extreme adulation and vehement criticism. Accounts tell of large crowds prostrating themselves before him, believing him to be an avatar. Yet he died with relatively few followers, his reputation in both India and Britain largely ruined. As a representative of India, Keshab became emblematic of broad concerns regarding Hinduism and Christianity, science and faith, India and the British Empire. This innovative study explores the transnational historical forces that shaped Keshab's life and work. It offers an alternative religious history of empire, characterized by intercultural dialogue and religious syncretism. A fascinating and often tragic portrait of Keshab's experience of the imperial world, and the ways in which he carried meaning for his contemporaries.


Latter-day Screens

Latter-day Screens

Author: Brenda R. Weber

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-09-13

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1478005297

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From Sister Wives and Big Love to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, Mormons and Mormonism are pervasive throughout American popular media. In Latter-day Screens, Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and reconfigures collective notions of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, capitalism, justice, and individualism. Focusing on Mormonism as both a meme and an analytic, Weber analyzes a wide range of contemporary media produced by those within and those outside of the mainstream and fundamentalist Mormon churches, from reality television to feature films, from blogs to YouTube videos, and from novels to memoirs by people who struggle to find agency and personhood in the shadow of the church's teachings. The broad archive of mediated Mormonism contains socially conservative values, often expressed through neoliberal strategies tied to egalitarianism, meritocracy, and self-actualization, but it also offers a passionate voice of contrast on behalf of plurality and inclusion. In this, mediated Mormonism and the conversations on social justice that it fosters create the pathway toward an inclusive, feminist-friendly, and queer-positive future for a broader culture that uses Mormonism as a gauge to calibrate its own values.


Governing Islam

Governing Islam

Author: Julia Stephens

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-06-21

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1107173914

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Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.


Amar Akbar Anthony

Amar Akbar Anthony

Author: William Elison

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-01-04

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0674504488

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The 1977 blockbuster Amar Akbar Anthony about the heroics of three Bombay brothers separated in childhood became a classic of Hindi cinema and a touchstone of Indian popular culture. Beyond its comedy and camp is a potent vision of social harmony, but one that invites critique, as the authors show.