Reading Culture in Literature and Media
While there are a variety of approaches to literary and media analysis, our faculty tend to research how literature/media shape and reflect culture. How do literature and media shape children's (and adults') perception of their world? How can individual people–authors, filmmakers, readers, editors–impact not just the publishing industry but also their culture through what they write and think? How is personal identity written into literature and media, and how does that impact readers? These are the kinds of questions that spur many of our faculty members' research.
Featured Publications
Understanding Will Self introduces readers to the satire and expressive ingenuity of a British writer who has garnered an array of awards since the 1991 publication of his first short story collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. In this guide to the well-received but largely unstudied writer, M. Hunter Hayes examines the key themes, narrative strategies, and cultural commentaries that characterize Self’s work. Through close textual analyses, Hayes guides readers through the alternative universe of Self’s writing and maps the interplay between his forays into journalism and fiction. Marked by their combination of seemingly improbable events and quotidian details, Self’s novels, novellas, and short stories examine contemporary English life through a mode of writing that he has aptly termed “dirty magical realism.” Hayes shows how recurring characters have evolved through successive works and in relation to their environments. He places Self’s writing within its historical and critical contexts and uses each chapter to address either a single work or a group of closely connected works. Hayes’s analyses range from well-regarded novels to notable yet uncollected short stories and draw upon secondary critical texts to reassess Self’s critical standing.
Thinking Critically through Literature, Film and Art is a multidisciplinary guide integrating global literature, psychology, and philosophy. It positions critical thinking as a practical tool for understanding individual cognition, well-being, and the broader human experience. The book draws on theoretical and practical perspectives from a wide range of global narratives. Materials for developing and practicing critical thinking include cave pictorial art, fairy tale, speeches, short stories, poems, short films, and literary excerpts. These serve as essential resources for examining the evolution of language, identity, learning, and thought in a multicultural context. Through analysis of this diverse range of texts, Maia Lamarque offers a distinctive exploration of mindfulness and well-being as integral components of the critical thinker’s identity. The book also features practical exercises, discussion boards, quizzes, and mind maps. This informative and innovative guidebook draws on the intersections between literary studies and film with social movements to provide scholars, students, and activists with the tools to develop their critical thinking and communication skills, and to actively engage in their cognitive processes and self-awareness.
Read More: “Thinking Critically through Literature, Film and Art: Theory and Practice”
The young nation of Kosova has created programs and allocated ample funding for filmmakers to tell important stories, especially in the aftermath of the Kosova War of 1998–99. Many of these filmmakers are women, and their films are concerned with women's lives in Kosova during and especially after the war. Hive, Zana, and Looking for Venera are three recent Kosovar films that feature female protagonists whose lives illustrate the effects of the war on women, gender relations, and the nation. The protagonists challenge the assumed gender dynamics and are part of a larger social movement within Kosova that echoes global struggles for women's rights, whose aim is to uncouple nationalism from masculinity in efforts to dismantle deep-seated misogyny so that the nation can protect and uphold all people, regardless of gender or any other identity-defining category.
Kosovar filmmakers craft films that speak not only through the visual image and what is seen but perhaps even more powerfully through what remains unseen and unsaid. Eralda L. Lameborshi watches the films of Kosova and finds that this resistance to closure is a form of honesty about a society that is still living with unresolved loss.
Read More: “The Cinema of Kosova and the Architecture of Absence”
Within the context of American attitudes about spinsters and violence, this chapter analyzes journalist Julian Ralph’s trial reportage for the New York Sun. Ralph articulates the case as a public hearing about the marginal status of spinsters and characterizes Lizzie Borden as an innocent woman standing at the mercy of a ruthless group of bloodthirsty local trial-goers, mostly women, who seek the conviction of the Old Maid, as he called Borden. The chapter examines newspaper pieces written by Anna Katharine Green and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, suggesting that their supportive journalistic missives, read in concert with Ralph’s characterization of Borden, add to the subtextual conversation about suspicious spinsters at play within the trial. It considers Green’s and Phelps’s emphases of Borden as an unmarried woman against their literary attitudes about spinsters, as reflected as well in the fiction published by other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors.
Read More: “Lizzie Borden, Spinster on Trial: Journalism, Literature, and the Borden Trial”
Female reporters represent prisons and asylums with sympathy and invade a male-dominated profession. In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped, undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell's Island mental asylum. She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse. Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a developing professional identity—that of the American newspaperwoman. The Blackwell's Island story is just one example of how newspaperwomen used sympathetic rhetoric to depict madness and crime while striving to establish their credentials as professional writers. Working against critics who would deny them access to the newsroom, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Nellie Bly, and Elizabeth Jordan subverted the charge that women were not emotionally equipped to work for mass-market newspapers. They transformed their supposed liabilities into professional assets, and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores how, in writing about insane asylums, the mentally ill, prisons, and criminals, each deployed a highly gendered sympathetic language to excavate a professional space within a male-dominated workplace. As the periodical market burgeoned, these pioneering, courageous women exemplified how narrative sympathy opened female space within the “hard news” city room of America's largest newspapers. Sympathy, Madness, and Crime offers a new chapter in the unfolding histories of nineteenth-century periodical culture, women's professional authorship, and the narrative construction of American penal and psychiatric institutions.
Children's Literature and Culture: An Introduction guides readers in the study of culture in, around, and through children's literature. Children's literature has long been used as a mechanism by which a culture passes its values from one generation to the next. Because of this culturally didactic purpose, children's literature can be viewed as one of the most fruitful areas of study of any given culture. At the same time, studying the cultures from which works of children's literature emerge and in which they circulate can also help better understand not only the ideas of childhood that underpin individual texts for children but the role they play in the construction and transmission of different cultural ideologies. This book teaches readers this double work of using culture to understand children's literature and vice versa. This volume traces the scholarly methodologies and histories that have attended the study of each of the 20 chapters' given subject—from the representation of race in and around children's literature to questions of censorship to how libraries can and do shape children's literature. In the process, it prepares readers to confidently enter and forward scholarly debates and to teach such debates to their own students.
Read More: “Children’s Literature and Culture: An Introduction”
This book examines contemporary adaptations of children's literature to illuminate two interconnected trends in twenty-first-century US culture: the courting of adult consumers by children's media industries and the shift in American cultural conceptions of adulthood. Using the double meaning of kidult (an audience designation and a description of a person) as a framework, Adapting American Adulthood explores how the representation of adulthood changes when texts move from the child-focused world of the children's book to the more adult-focused world of kidult screen media and fandoms. In studying this shift in implied audience, this book argues that children's media companies began appealing directly to the kidult, rather than to the adult-as-parent, at the moment when the ideal adulthood sold to Americans since the 1940s started to crumble. This book examines how this shift has led to Americans reimagining an adulthood that leaves room for childness and children's media.
Read More: “Adapting American Adulthood: From Children’s Literature to Kidult Media”
This paper examines the Netflix miniseries Adolescence (2025) as a cultural representation of incel masculinity, and situates it within contemporary debates on gender, youth culture, and digital subcultures. The series, which dramatizes the case of a thirteen-year old boy accused of murder, has resonated globally by exposing how misogynistic discourses embedded in online communities intersect with adolescent anxieties. This study emphasizes how popular culture reveals the structural conditions that sustain misogynistic youth culture in incel communities. Drawing on R. W. Connell' s theory of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, the paper explores how incels embody a contradictory stance: white excluded from dominant masculine ideals yet complicit in reinforcing them through misogyny and self-stigmatization. Ultimately, the paper argues that Adolescence makes visible the hybrid, unstable, and destructive forms of masculinity emerging at the intersection of digital culture, misogyny, and neoliberal precarity. Cultural representations of incels, it suggests, open a space for collective reflection and response to the structural conditions that produce misogynistic violence.
Read More: “The Representation of Incel Masculinity in ‘Adolescence'”
