Kirsten Day’s title is the latest publication in the series ‘Screening Antiquity’ by Edinburgh University Press, the only series of academic monographs focusing on new research concerning the reception of the ancient world in film and television and the conception of antiquity in popular culture. At first, there would be reservations connecting the book’s title […]
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Category: B. R. Literature
Book reviews, mostly covering literature.
Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos… by Michael K. Johnson (2014)
The westward expansion in the 18th and 19th century is well documented and was done by (what we believe) an entirely white/Caucasian group of people who took their chances and finally settled the West; if we believe the many tales, novels and most importantly the countless western movies. But actually, there were also some others, […]
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow (2016)
Psychedelic drugs, most prominently LSD, can be credited for having changed Americans and American culture forever. Hardly anything else in the last 60 years has had such a strong influence on American culture as a whole, meaning it had the power to influence the arts (in particular, music), politics, spirituality, technology and naturally a high […]
Connecting Detectives: The Influence of 19th Century Sleuth Fiction… by Lewis D. Moore (2015)
Not only in detective fiction the issue of motive and “just how” things were finally done is of interest, the same questions (and more like them) are relevant in the simple analysis of literary traditions in which the authors of that fiction could benefit from. Lewis Moore tries to find complementary, similar behavior and continuing […]
Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain by Melanie Keene (2015)
Mythical characters from folklore and fairy tales saw a revival unprecedented in 19th-century England. Fairies, and their realms, for many authors served as prominent means to comment on contemporary society and fairy tales were used as parables. Taking into consideration the many modern inventions such as steam engines, machines and electricity that transformed everyday life, […]
Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ by The Subcultures Network (2015)
The seven concise chapters of the book at hand actually represent a special issue of Contemporary British History (26.3) from 2012. They were conceived as the results of a symposium devoted to examining youth-associated cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that transformed Britain in the aftermath of WWII. The post-war consensus (1945-1979), […]
Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (eds.) (2012)
There are probably many millions of people worldwide awaiting the new Star Wars episode to be presented in December 2015, including your reviewer here. So even if the book at hand came out some months ago, now is the time to devote some lines to it. The topics of this volume are subsumed under the […]
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)
What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]
The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic by Jürgen Holstein (ed.) (2015)
Berlin between the wars was a prospering and innovative capital unlike any other in the world. In 1927 alone Berlin was home to 929 publishing houses and put out a fourth of Germany’s entire book production. Book printing was also promoted by the many local newspapers and their respective hardware; to tap the full potential […]