Strange Dislocations

Using the perspectives of social and cultural history, and the history of psychology and physiology, Strange Dislocations traces a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost vision has come to assume the form of a child.

Grounded in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality and drawing on a broad range of disciplines, this book examines the government of childhood in the West from the early modern period to the present. The book deals with three key time-periods and examines shifts in the conceptualization and regulation of childhood and child-rearing.

The links between cinema and war machines have long been established. This book explores the range, form, and valences of trauma narratives that permeate the most notable narrative films about the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Margaret Mead’s career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead’s four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them. Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana’s "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society. Two themes subtend Molloy’s analysis. The first is Mead’s articulation of the individual’s relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead’s attitude toward and definition of "culture"—from the cultural determinism in Coming of Age to culture as the enemy of the individual in Sex and Temperament. This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s. On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism.

A Queer History of Adolescence reveals categories of age—and adolescence, specifically—as an undeniable and essential mechanism in the production of difference itself. Drawing from a dynamic and varied archive, including British and American newspapers, medical papers and pamphlets, and adolescent and children’s literature circulating on both sides of the Atlantic, Gabrielle Owen argues that adolescence has a logic, a way of thinking, that emerges over the course of the nineteenth century and that survives in various forms to this day. This logic makes the idea of adolescence possible and naturalizes our historically specific ways of conceptualizing time, development, social hierarchy, and the self. Rich in intersectional analysis, this book offers a multifaceted and historicized theory for categories of age that challenges existing methodologies for studying the people called children and adolescents. Rather than offering critique as an end in and of itself, A Queer History of Adolescence imagines the world-making possibilities that critique enables and, in so doing, shines a necessary light on the question of relationality in the lived world. Owen exposes the profound presence of history in our current moment in order to transform the habits of mind shaping age relations, social hierarchy, and the politics of identity today.

The presence of the Past studies the interaction of heritage and fiction written for children over a 40 year period in Britain, exploring a range of works for children from The Tale of Peter Rabbit to I Spy.

This book outlines how an innovative ‘rights-based’ model of contemporary performance practice can be used when working with children and young people. This model, framed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), challenges the idea of children as vulnerable and in need of protection, argues for the recognition of the child’s voice, and champions the creativity of children in performance. Sarah Austin draws on rich research and practitioner experience to analyse Youth Arts pedagogies, inclusive theatre practice, models of participation, the symbolic potential of the child in performance, and the work of contemporary theatre practitioners making work with children for adult audiences. The combined practical and written research reflected in this book offers a new, nuanced understanding of children as cultural agents, raising the prospect of a creative process that foregrounds deeper considerations of the strengths and capacities of children. This book would primarily appeal to scholars of theatre and performance studies, specifically those working in the field of applied theatre and theatre for children and young people. Additionally, the practice-based elements of the book are likely to appeal to theatre professionals working in youth arts or theatre for young audiences or associated fields.

For centuries, southern Europe, and Italy in particular, has offered writers far more than an evocative setting for important works of literature. The voyage south has been an integral part of the imagination of inspiration. Haunted Museum is a groundbreaking, in-depth look at fantasies of Italy from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, focusing on a literary tradition Jonah Siegel terms the "art romance"--the fantastic voyage south understood as the register of an ambivalent desire for art and a heightened experience of reality. Siegel argues that Italy's allure derives not only from its celebrated promise of unique natural beauty and prized antiquities, but from the opportunity it offers writers to place themselves in relation to a web of prior accounts of travel to the native land of genius. Beginning with Goethe as the founding figure of the tradition, Haunted Museum moves from a rich reframing of literature from the first half of the nineteenth century--including new readings of works by Byron, de Staël, Barrett Browning, and others--to an ambitious examination of Henry James's well-known engagement with Europe, newly understood as a response to this important literary legacy. Readings of works by Freud, Forster, Mann, and Proust demonstrate the longevity of the tradition of looking to Italy for the representation of desires as impossible to satisfy as they are to deny.