Possessed by the beast: subjectivity and agency in pictures in the dark and foxspell

The first book to assess critically mystery in children's literature, this collection charts a development from religious mystery through rationally solved detective fictions to insoluble supernatural and horror mysteries. Written by internationally recognised scholars in the field, these thirteen original essays offer challenging and innovative readings of both classic and popular mysteries for children. This volume will be essential and stimulating reading for anyone with an interest in children's literature or in mystery fiction.

Picturing Australian history: visual texts in nonfiction for children

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. The historical novel of the West grew out of Romanticism, with its exploration of the inner world of feeling, and it grew to full vigor in the era of imperialism and the exploration of the physical world. From the end of the 18th century, children's books flourished, partly in response to these cultural and political influences. After Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, literary works began to grapple with skepticism about the nature of time itself. This book explores how children's writers have presented the theme and concept of time past. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine. So too, the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.

Apprehending butterflies and flying beauties : bringing magical realism to ground

[No Abstract]

Consumption and the meaning of life

Through an analysis of data from depth interviews with modern American consumers, we examine whether and how individuals quest for life’s meaning through consumption. Our analysis identifies three worldviews that are differently related to the experience of transcendence through consumption. A rationalist worldview is revealed as being unrelated to such a pursuit. It contrasts two magical worldviews held by most informants in which consumption objects are infused with supernatural and metaphysical beliefs that animate life’s meaning for them. Our discussion highlights how recognition of magical worldviews contributes to consumer theory, methods, and concepts of investigation.

Determining dramatic intensification via flashing lights in movies

Movie directors and producers worldwide, in their quest to narrate a good story that warrants repeated audience viewing, use many cinematic elements to intensify and clarify the viewing experience. One such element that directors manipulate is lighting. In this paper we examine one aspect of lighting, namely flashing lights, and its role as an intensifier of dramatic effects in film. We present an algorithm for robust extraction of flashing lights and a simple mechanism to group detected flashing lights into flashing light scenes and analyze the role of these segments in story narration. In addition, we demonstrate how flashing lights detection can improve the performance of shot-based video segmentation. Experiments on a number of video sequences extracted from real movies yields good results. Our technique detects 90.4% of flashing lights. The detected flashing lights correctly eliminates 92.7% of false cuts in these sequences. In addition, data support is compiled to demonstrate the association between flashing light scenes and certain dramatic intensification events such as supernatural power, crisis or excitement.

Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox’s Fern Gully (1992)

 Informed by ecocriticism, this article conducts a comparative examination of two contemporary animated children’s films, Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fern Gully (1992). While both films advocate for the prevention of deforestation, they are, to varying degrees, antithetical to environmentalism. Both films reject the principles of deep ecology in displacing responsibility for environmental destruction on to ‘supernatural’ forces and exhibit anthropocentric concern for the survival of humans. We argue that these films constitute divergent methodological approaches for environmental consciousness-raising in children’s entertainment. The western world production demonstrates marked conservatism in its depiction of identity politics and ‘cute’ feminization of nature, while Hayao Miyazaki’s film renders nature sublime and invokes complex socio-cultural differences. Against FernGully’s ‘othering’ of working-class and queer characters, we posit that Princess Mononoke is decidedly queer, anti-binary and ideologically bi-partisan and, in accord with the underlying principle of environmental justice, asks child audiences to consider compassion for the poor in association with care for nature.

Introduction: secularization and its discontents

Sigmund Freud’s 1927 work The Future of Illusion expresses the great psychoanalyst’s most whiggish assessment of the situation of Western, post-enlightenment societies. In it, Freud reanimates the ancient tradition of the materialist-Epicurean criticism of religion, with its skepticism concerning all invisible powers. For Freud, famously, the religious belief in higher, supernatural deities—particularly, the monotheistic God—represents a wish-fulfillment and illusion (Freud 1927: 30, 43). This illusion takes its particular shapes from our earliest childhood experiences of helplessness, and the longing for an all-protecting, omnibenevolent father. With the progress of science, and its benefits in technology, Freud opined that the period of the cultural pre-eminence of religion in the West was over. Civilization and its Discontents, written 3 years later, expresses a similarly sceptical assessment of religion. Whether founded in an oceanic, mystical sentiment of oneness, or the refined language of the theologians, religion remains for Freud ‘patently infantile’ (Freud 1930: 86). Between 1927 and 1930, however, Freud’s assessment of the wider prospects of modern Kultur shifted, if it did not entirely reverse. With the fortunes of fascism rising, and the first clouds of renewed European war forming on the horizon, Freud now argues that the psychological price demanded by the modern world’s manifold civilizational advances is perhaps too high. The sexual and aggressive impulses modern society demands subjects renounce must return in the forms of organized violence, collective and individual neuroses—and in the same form of unconscious guilt Freud had argued elsewhere animated the totems and taboos of the great religions (Freud 1913, 1938). Although Freud did not draw the conclusion, the logic of his wider Kulturpessimismus points to the claim that the psychologically deep-set ‘illusions’ of religion could expect a long and viable future.

We are in danger

Genre films are constructed out of narrative patterns and plot points that involve or are predicted on crisis, on danger. This is the logic of much if not all mainstream genre cinema: drama has to take place for there to be a story to be told, and for pleasure and identification to be arrested and enthused. Forms of threatening disequilibrium can be personal, domestic, familial, local, external, supernatural and murderous; a way of life can be threatened as well as life itself. There are ideological dimensions at play; the crisis threatens to destabilize patriarchy, heterosexuality, social norms and expectations. Feelings and modes of affect are set in dangerous motion as the crisis unfolds. Trouble may emerge from a wayward or transgressive family member, or it may arrive in town on horses, stagecoaches, trains, cars, spaceships, and on the wind and in the water. The main (and minor) characters in the film are at the center of this storm, and that places viewers at the epicenter of the danger, also. The genre film places us all in danger. The genre film, then, has phenomenal, phenomenological and bio-political potential as a site of cognitive, ideological and carnal endangerment.

Paranormal politics and the romance of urban subcultures: youth mobility in Cassandra Clare’s and Melissa Marr’s fantasy texts

This essay examines the political and social significance of the intrusion of the supernatural into youth subcultures in two urban fantasy series: Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments and Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely. Both series represent the idea of human youth mobility and social affiliation based on volition. The tolerant urban spaces through which their girl protagonists initially move accommodate a diversity of subcultural aesthetics. By contrast, the supernatural subcultures with which these girls become involved are fraught with conflict, and the mobility of their members is limited. Drawing on post-subcultural theory, we identify a tension between late modern and premodern social organization and political values in contemporary urban fantasy for young adults and compare how it is resolved in Clare’s and Marr’s texts.

Melbourne Festival review: Triptyque's blend of circus and dance a new breed of hybrid

Like the traditional of tri-panelled artworks, Les 7 Doigts' Triptyque presents a trio of adjacent works. Created by established dancemakers, these works explore the intersection of circus, dance and theatre. Although visually quite different, when viewed together, there are thematic through-lines such as the extension and augmentation of the body, with human morphologies shifting to encompass the supernatural, the bestial, and the psychological. All three works draw on the rich and varied conventions of circus and dance (bearing in mind that the lines between these forms have long been blurring), but there is a sense here of a new flavour of hybridity.