Explore the enduring influence of the Western - the quintessential American film genre - and its essential role in US and world culture.

Follow the entire history of the Western, from its roots in the pulp novels of the early 20th century, through the serials of the silent era and the mid-century classics of John Ford and John Wayne, to the recent award-winning revisionist works, like Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men, that provide a more complex and nuanced take on history of the West. Perhaps more than any other pop culture genre, the Western allows us to view how Americans have seen themselves over the last 150 years.

Build a foundational understanding of the genre with 5 introductory essays, exploring the development of the Western Mythos in the traditional Western, the heyday of the traditional Western in the post-WWII period, revisionist Westerns and the counterculture, race and identify, and the Western outside of the USA. Close to 100 encyclopedia entries examine one or more movies or television programs and show how their creation and plots demonstrate the overall evolution of the genre. Easily compare films and TV programs - from early genre favorites such as Gunsmoke to more recent releases like Django Unchained - with essential facts boxes accompanying each entry, with information on the director, studio, key actors, and box office receipts.

The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski 1999) has permeated our cultural consciousness for two decades, working its way into such common parlance as "a glitch in the Matrix," and the idea of taking the Red Pill. With the release of the fourth movie, The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski 2021), and the confirmation of the franchise being a metaphor for gender transition, this book examines how the entire franchise contributes to the discourse on sex and gender, and how it has been instrumental in propelling the creation of new types of cyborg technology. This book centers on the main philosophical theme of The Matrix, know thyself, and relate it to the quest for authenticity which creates our identities-be they human, or human "enough"-as we move through the world.

This book studies British cultural engagement with Napoleon Bonaparte from his 1815 surrender and time in British custody, until the return of his remains to France in 1840.

Adopting a chronological approach, James Gregory studies the British use of Bonaparte in various spheres - covering political, dramatic, literary, and visual culture, and popular entertainment over a 25-year period. Gregory acknowledges not only canonical literary treatments, but also appearances of the figure in novels, anecdotes, travelling shows, and private collections - in order to analyse contemporary fascination with Napoleon.

Centring on key themes such as responses to Napoleon's presence on British territory, and later reactions to his death, Gregory also takes into account the influence of factors such as geography and gender, in order to craft a comprehensive picture of cultural engagement with Napoleon in the period 1815-40. Covering factors including the role of commemoration, the impact of Peterloo and Queen Caroline's death, and the rise of Romanticism, this book demonstrates how truly pervasive the myth of Napoleon became in 19th-century Britain.

Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.

Javaria Farooqui inspects the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.

Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author.

Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry - its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions.

Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

This book aims to assess the extent to which work health, safety and wellbeing (HSW) considerations are trivialised on the popular Australian reality TV programme, The Block. Reality TV as a genre plays a core feature in media and cultural studies, but there has not been any research on the impact of reality TV on safety culture, or how HSW issues are portrayed in popular media.

This research remedies this deficiency and demonstrates contestants are workers on The Block who perform workplace activities. The work-related activities are concerned with construction, building and renovation work; and specifically, participants engage in what are seemingly routine or ordinary everyday life activities; namely housing construction and domestic or home dwelling renovations. It supports the argument claim that contestants on reality TV are defined as workers, and this definition of worker can be extended to other genres.

The book ultimately demonstrates that reality television is trivialising HSW for the purposes of satisfying audience desire to consume popular culture, and these activities perpetuate a poor image of best safety practice.

This book examines the issues arising from British contested history by looking at how it came to be constructed, how it developed, and how attitudes over time have begun to change towards it. It considers how this narrative was first created through the writing of British history. It explores the private spaces of the court, the political places of the state, and the public places of the street. Beyond British shores this history has also been enacted through international heritage sites when objects were removed and taken back to Britain. Conclusively, it explores how the historic spaces of a maritime city, has further entrenched an already complex history of the nation. How this research brings new insights into this field is by looking at it through the lens of place, space, and the spatial turn. The underlining research questions are: What role does place and space play in historical constructions of the past? How do place and space contribute to contested history? How can these places and spaces be re-appropriated and reused, and endowed with new meanings?

This second edition of the handbook gives a new scientific perspective to youth and childhood studies as multi scientific and interdisciplinary subjects which as such have not yet found their own framing in a particular discipline. It provides theoretical and methodological key debates and issues that develop and add an understanding of childhood and youth research discipline from a broader perspective. The Handbook on Children and Youth Studies draws on current thinking, but also challenges theoretical and conceptual orthodoxies in the field, drawing on interdisciplinary thinking and critical perspectives. It focuses on childhood and youth to address the emerging consensus that the boundaries between childhood, youth and adulthood are blurred. The view that defining youth and childhood largely in terms of problem topics is out dated. Instead, the handbook focuses on 16 themes that are open to international perspectives and to different conceptual approaches. Each theme is edited by a pair of field editors, thereby capturing a plurality of views. The 16 themes as a starting point are globally timely and they need scientific debates on the boundaries between childhoods, youth and adulthood. This handbook will meet the needs of childhood and youth researchers and the academics in the field. It recognizes the changing social context of the lives of children and young people, while developing theoretical frameworks and discussing about the core substantive issues of Children and Youth Studies.

Lessons, resources, and annotated answer keys for instructors at all levels in teaching copyright law.

The teaching of copyright and related concepts can easily be overwhelming to instructors who are experts in their field but may have little to no detailed understanding of copyright law. They require reliable, accessible information to coach students on copyright-related matters.

Teaching Copyright: Practical Lesson Ideas and Instructional Resources provides explicit guidance based on U.S. copyright law in the teaching of copyright and related concepts to learners at schools, colleges, and universities. Instructors are supported with time-saving resources such as lesson templates, scenarios, practice activities, and a downloadable test question bank.

Additionally, Bloom's Taxonomy labels lessons, activities, and assessment items to enable an appropriately diverse set of learning for students. Instead of reducing copyright to simple recall, the lessons and information in this text will help instructors develop higher-level thinking about copyright and assist them in measuring learners' abilities not just to remember, but also to analyze and evaluate copyright dilemmas.

This innovative book has combined the latest drive to integrate the findings and principles of quantum mechanics and quantum technology, especially here quantum computing, into the flamboyant world of social sciences. Starting with Friedrich Nietzsche as a role model, especially his "Human, All-too-Human," the book explores the world of interpersonal and intrapersonal, intercultural and transhistorical, human communication. This book uses an innovative experiential and abductive research design. The philosophy inspired by Nietzsche meets new inspirations stemming from quantum mechanics and quantum computing in particular.

Building on derived guiding principles of (fuzzy) randomness, parallelity, and universality (with communication, words and feelings, as the least common denominator), the book arrives at the formation of a new quantum-inspired theory, called the Theory of Human Entanglement, where entanglements are causal forces for human communication (and hence human actions) that either instigate and propel, or inhibit and stifle human communication (and thus human actions). Human entanglements are diverse; they are complex and accumulative in nature. They operate in a multi-dimensional space, encompassing language usage (including their hidden connotations and culturally constructed truths, such as hidden notions of good and evil, allowed and forbidden), cultural traditions and limitations, governance, institutions, court rulings and practices, particular usages of common sense, local/neighborhood culture and practices, socio-economic and environmental forces and limitations, personal situations and experiences, personal thoughts, feelings, memories and aspirations, and much more.

The theory may serve as starting point for greater causality focus in research design and applications across all social sciences and far beyond, especially when dealing with high number or infinite number of potentially causal and causal variables, as well as their aggregate forces (i.e. probability-based vector forces). On top, artificial intelligence applications, quantum information, and quantum finance applications, for example, may contribute to the further development of human entanglement theory, and vice versa.

This open access book highlights the link between Bruno Latour's works and the semiotic perspective on social phenomena analysis. It identifies and relaunches a dialogue that was as heated as it was fruitful, but still little recognized within the social sciences. It asks why the theory of signification has so far been only sporadically acknowledged in literature derived from Latour's work. Starting from these premises, the book explores two interrelated dimensions, the initial one of a "semiotics for Latour", which looks at concepts from semiotics in Latour's study of social phenomena, and extensively for the first time, a symmetrical one of a "Latour for semiotics," accounting for the impact of Latourian inquiry on contemporary semiotic research. The book offers a novel perspective on Bruno Latour's work by addressing a wide readership, including those interested in Latour's approach, actor-network theory, semiotics, and the social sciences.

The English translation of this book from the Italian original manuscript was done with the help of artificial intelligence, then revised technically and linguistically by the author in collaboration with a professional translator.

This book considers communication across difference in a variety of humanistic contexts, from classical Greek literature, to continental philosophy, environmental studies, media studies, science and technology studies, animal studies, and beyond. With contributors from all around the globe (including Portugual, South Africa, Turkiye, China, Italy, and other countries), this volume provides a truly diverse range of perspectives on the philosophical and practical dimensions of communicating across otherness and difference.

This volume addresses the social-relational nature of moral formation, emotions, and moral agency. Drawing on Barth's theological anthropology and his relational conception of the self, Cahill argues that Barth envisions moral progress as rooted in the growth of the community. Cahill also explores Barth's view of emotion in conversation with the study of emotions in psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

Building on Barth and these other disciplines Cahill argues for a relational and cognitive conception of emotions while highlighting emotions' critical role in regulating group and social relations. Emotions are fundamental to interpersonal interactions, to group relations, and for the reinforcement and disruption of social structures. This account of moral formation and emotion is illustrated through the example of climate change. A community shaped by love for God, solidarity with other creatures, and a concern for all of creation leads to an awareness of hegemonic forces and fosters emotions shaped by the kingdom of God that enables the struggle for climate justice.