Author Profile

Stephen Whatson’s work lies at the intersection of early modern drama, cultural studies, and digital humanities. He is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University, where he teaches and writes about literature and visual culture. He is also interested in writing and media production. His research spans the modern period (from the late eighteenth century to the present) and focuses on the complex relationship between cultural artifacts and the contexts of their production and reception. His current research interests include Victorian popular fiction, the modernist novel, magical realism and the postmodern fantastic, media history, early cinema, and the graphic novel. His work has been published in journals such as Comparative Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Grey Room, and Early Popular Visual Culture. His book, Foreign Modernism: Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Style in Paris, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2013. If you want, I can also make it shorter or more formal for publication.

About The Book

Taking into account the vicissitudes of political, social, and cultural issues, the book engages deeply with the evolving understanding of critical concepts such as history, community, culture, identity, politics, ethics, globalization, and technology. The book address the extent to which these concepts have been useful to scholars, policy makers, and citizens, as well as the ways they must be rethought and reconsidered if they are to continue to be viable. The text considers what is known and understood about these concepts. The book gives particular attention to how relevant ideas, themes, and terms were developed, elaborated, and deployed. The culture in which one lives determines the culture that is created within it, but influence works in the other direction as well. One could even go so far as to say that the second meaning of culture as human creativity is our way of modifying the first meaning of culture as civilized normativity. Creative culture is often accused of being uncivil because it breaks existing norms and points the way toward the creation of new ones. When the bohemian movement started in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century, it was an attempt on the part of creative people to upset the reigning norms of the culture, which were perceived as being too restrictive, too allied with conservatism, commerce, and a narrow scientific view of knowledge. To use a contemporary analogy, culture is the software of our lives. It is the program we live by, the rules that determine how we think and act. But it is also the malleable, rewritable script that we ourselves rework and recreate as we live and produce creative works and say and do creative things in our lives. Culture is a more inclusive term than art, another name for human creativity, because it allows for everyday art and common creativity, something that happens without frames or legitimizing institutions such as galleries or museums or concert halls. Culture understood as what maintains civility in communities is necessary because nature propels humans toward physical survival in ways that can lead to violence, domination, and injustice. Culture and civility are our ways of tempering those physical urges, but violence, domination, and injustice occur nevertheless, and Cultural Studies has a moral, ethical, and political dimension to the degree that it takes stock of that reality. A rapidly changing world - in part driven by huge transformations in technology and mobility-means we all encounter shifting cultures, and new cultural and social interactions daily.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Policy and Industry
2. Place, Space, and Geography
3. Gender and Sexuality
4. Ideologies
5. Rhetoric With Brett Ingram
6. Ethnicity
7. Identity, Lifestyle, and Subculture
8. Consumer Culture and Fashion Studies
9. Music With Brett Ingram
10. Media Studies
11. Visual Culture With Brett Ingram
12. Audience, Performance, and Celebrity
13. Bodies And Things
14. Transnationality, Globalization, and Postcoloniality
15. Culture, Communication and Representation
16. Culture, Power, Globalisation and Inequality
17. Researching Culture
18. Topographies Of Culture: Geography, Meaning and Power
19. Politics And Culture
20. The Postmodernisation Of Everyday Life: Consumption And Information Technologies
21. Cultured Bodies
Bibliography
Index