This book explores the cognitive inter-dynamics of two overarching dimensions of human consciousness, referred to as This World and The Otherworld, respectively. Together, these dimensions may create, for any developing girl, a more-or-less unique experience of the archetype referred to here as Lolita, in the Mist. This “mist” may be a vital detail of Lolita imagery for an individual girl feeling protected enough to explore her budding sexuality in This World that is conjured, to a significant degree, through The Otherworld dimension. Indeed, such imagery may be a part of what dreaming experienced in waking life is made of. The book will be of interest to scholars and other researchers interested in how visual and social perceptual processes, principally through film imagery, might create a more phenomenological experience of the archetype through the interplay between This World and The Otherworld, as each exists within all of us.

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

In the twenty-first century, fatherhood is shifting from simply being a sidekick in the parental team to taking center stage with new expectations of involvement and caretaking. The social expectations of fathers start even before the children are born. Mr. Mom is now displaced with fathers who don’t think of themselves as babysitting their own children, but as central decision makers, along with mothers, as parents. Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture is an interdisciplinary edited collection of essays authored by prominent scholars in the fields of media, sociology, and cultural studies who address how media represent the image of the father in popular culture. This collection explores the history of representation of fathers like the “bumbling dad” to question and challenge how far popular culture has come in its representation of paternal figures. Each chapter of this book focuses on a different aspect of media, including how advertising creates expectations of play and father, crime shows and the new hero father, and men as paternal figures in horror films. The book also explores changing definitions of fatherhood by looking at such subjects as how the media represents sperm donation as complicating the definition of father and how specific groups have been represented as fathers, including gay men as dads and Latino fathers in film. This collection examines the media’s depiction of the “good” father to study how it both challenges and reshapes the ways in which we think of family, masculinity, and gender roles.

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

Joseph Hartman focuses on the public works campaign of Cuban president, and later dictator, Gerardo Machado. Political histories often condemn Machado as a US-puppet dictator, overthrown in a labor revolt and popular revolution in 1933. Architectural histories tend to catalogue his regime’s public works as derivatives of US and European models. Dictator’s Dreamscape reassesses the regime’s public works program as a highly nuanced visual project embedded in centuries-old representations of Cuba alongside wider debates on the nature of art and architecture in general, especially in regards to globalization and the spread of US-style consumerism. The cultural production overseen by Machado gives a fresh and greatly broadened perspective on his regime’s accomplishments, failures, and crimes. The book addresses the regime’s architectural program as a visual and architectonic response to debates over Cuban national identity, US imperialism, and Machado’s own cult of personality.

In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.