Journal of Popular Culture最新文献

Chinese narratives of the Rape of Nanking gravitate to a secular, nationalist mode of martyrdom. With China's rise, fiction and films revisit the Japanese atrocity in a global context, which means fiction written in or translated into English, as well as films featuring Western missionaries and the English language. These narratives include Nanjing Requiem; The Flowers of War the novel and the film; and City of Life and Death. The English and Christian epistemology intertwines to bracket such representations. Both the tongue and the God of whites are ways of meaning-making to sublimate a historical trauma of unfathomable horror.

In my paper, I argue that young-adult author John Green recognizes the problematic ways conventional literary representations of people with disabilities contribute to the dehumanization of people with impairments. Furthermore, I suggest that Green's vibrant characters in The Fault in Our Stars and the connection readers have formed with them illuminate the power that realistic and, therefore, necessarily complex representations of characters with disabilities hold in transforming how people approach others with impairments, and, ultimately, how people with disabilities construct their own identities.

This study examines filmic (mis)use of monstrous sharks as metaphors for exploring prey and predation, and how these films have incorporated postfeminist discourses around a symbolic overcoming of gendered violence. Research methods deployed include framing analysis of film narratives, dialogue and visual elements, including the key phrases and images used in the theatrical release posters and other promotional materials of shark attack horror films. The evolving shark horror film subgenre relies on common carefully constructed metaphors, narrative parallels, genre conventions and stylistic processes which not only convey gendered ideologies but build an entire contrived nightmare universe around human-shark interactions.

Fan culture has changed the whole entertainment industry, becoming “mainstream.” Thus, its expressions necessarily shape franchise cinema, including Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The study reacts to this shift, aiming to explore how MCU movies incorporate images of fan culture and turn some of their support characters into “fans.” The offered critical reflection on related theoretical outlines is intertwined with elements of discourse analysis. The authors focus on selected scenes from Marvel's superhero movies that depict and personalize fan culture. The examination is based on the assumption that such images function as efficient ways of celebrating and encouraging real-life fan activities.

Frasier (1993–2004) remains one of television's most successful and memorable sitcoms. Its protagonist, Dr. Frasier Crane, shares many qualities with other comic protagonists. However, he is in fact unique in the pantheon of comic characters. As the show moves forward, Frasier Crane regresses in several ways, and which is often effected through the show's use of ironic parallels. Furthermore, Frasier Crane's comic arc (or fulfillment of the comic mythos) is in stark contrast to not only traditional comic characters but even more recent post- and post-postmodern ones, all of whom either fulfill the comic arc or, at worst, remain static.

This essay deals with Korean romance novels translated into Chinese, especially the works of Kim Ha-in and Guiyeoni which forms a pattern of cross-cultural communication from the marginal culture to the center. Most studies treat them as an aspect of fast-food culture that undermines serious literature, with little attention to this literary and cultural phenomenon. Why are Korean romance novels so popular in contemporary China? There are some answers from different perspectives. However, it is obvious that Korean romance novels offered Chinese women the opportunity to reconceptualize gender. This article contributes to criticism on the interface between Korean romance novels and Chinese feminism and further unveils the relationship between Korean popular romance novels and new interpretations of femininity in contemporary China. The success of Korean romance novels benefits from the conscious choice of Chinese readers in the cross-cultural context, influenced by changes in Chinese women's concept of gender. The response to the aesthetic needs and expectations of readers has prompted the appearance of inverted cultural export, wherein such novels influence other cultures, reflecting upon and even challenging the gender concepts of other countries, which manifests the symbiotic relationship between popular literature and feminism.

British and Australian children's books about the Great War remain a steadfastly conservative example of popular culture, particularly when exploring war time nursing. The marginalized place of females in children's literature, the failure of the official histories to adequately acknowledge the unique experience of the nurses, and the popular focus on the battlefield have discouraged any sustained focus. This article will analyze how Hilary Robinson and Martin Impey (Peace Lily), Kate Simpson and Jess Racklyeft (Anzac Girl: The War Diaries of Alice Ross-King), and Mark Wilson (Rachel's War: The Story of an Australian WWI Nurse) have responded to this challenge.

This paper explores the Indian sports film as a category that gains popularity after the economic reforms of the 1990s. Influenced by the Hollywood sports film and global neoliberal ideals, these films incorporate local ideological influences and contribute to the prevailing discourse about sport in India. While mainstream films convey dominant values associated with sport, there are films which challenge these notions. This study examines two such films, Mukkabaaz (2017) and Sudani from Nigeria (2018), which carry subversive potential against hegemonic conceptions of individual, community, nation and merit, and offer an alternate understanding of sport and its role in society.

Studies on reflexivity in the field of comics studies have been scarce and, more often than not, disconnected from each other, which has resulted in overlapping, and sometimes even contradicting, classifications of reflexive devices. Therefore, this article analyzes different instances of self-awareness in American superhero comics, as it has become quite a popular feature in recent years. In order to systematize the corpus of American comics which feature self-aware characters, Pardo's theoretical model of reflexivity results highly advantageous due to the fact that its transmedia categories provide a useful framework to explore those elements which are particular to comics narration, such as panels, speech balloons, splash pages, and more of the like. At the same time, this theoretical model connects comics' self-consciousness to the larger storytelling tradition of Western culture—after all, some of the most important studies on reflexivity stem from literary and film studies, from scholars such as Alter, Hutcheon, Waugh, and Stam, to mention a few. This article, then, provides a theoretical review of key definitions from the field of reflexivity before applying said categories to a corpus of American superhero comics which includes titles such as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Black Hammer, and Empowered, as well as some Bat-Mite strips and a few Deadpool and Harley Quinn issues. The analysis mainly focuses on the diegetic disruptions that self-aware characters trigger in comics—particularly considering the formal elements of the medium—to prove that reflexivity, despite having been deemed as a tool to tackle serious existential and ontological issues in canonical works, operates as a bridge which brings readers as close as possible to the fictional realities in their favorite superhero comics.