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- Volume 31, Issue 2, 2012
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2012
Volume 31, Issue 2, 2012
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'Ashley Wilkes Told Me He Likes to See a Girl with a Healthy Appetite': Food and drink in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind
More LessDespite the passage of three-quarters of a century since its publication in 1936, critics and biographers still grapple with how to place Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (GWTW) within southern literature. While some hail GWTW as an example of the 'Great American Novel', others see the work as contributing to the perpetuation of destructive stereotypes concerning African Americans, as well as a nostalgic distortion of life in the nineteenth-century South. Nevertheless, GWTW remains an important text because of the insight it provides into numerous aspects of southern culture, especially foodways. The novel is replete with direct and indirect references to the culinary culture of the South, and the ways in which this culture interacted with racial and gender constructions. The presence of food (from the Wilkes barbecue at Twelve Oaks, to Scarlett's and Rhett's honeymoon feasts in New Orleans) and its absence (especially during the Civil War) serve as an underexamined thread in the work which underscores the interface between black and white and male and female.
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Hollywood stars vs variety show hosts: The incompatible case of Frank Sinatra on 1950s television
More LessThis article considers the identity of the variety show host on 1950s American television, exploring how Frank Sinatra's poorly received assumption of the role reveals its strictly limited alignment with a perceived middle-class suburban family audience. Television's attempt to invest its stars with a sense of the everyday in contrast to the extraordinary glamour provided by Hollywood guest stars is examined in the context of the positioning of Dinah Shore and Perry Como as idealized archetypes of the host identity. Exploring the critical reception of Frank Sinatra as both a variety show host and guest, as well as the unconventional star image presented through his performances on the small screen, the article argues that Sinatra explicitly illustrates the distinct ways in which the roles of variety show host and guest star were defined around the oppositions of television and Hollywood, comfort and disruption, ordinary and extraordinary, and suburban and urban.
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Seeing double: Disney's Wilderness Lodge
By David AllenWilderness Lodge is a hotel in Walt Disney World. It is a simulation of a historic national park lodge (based, in particular, on Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone). The hotel has been attacked as a 'simulacrum', which turns nature into a spectacle for our consumption. In their detailed analysis of the lodge, Eric Higgs and Jennifer Cypher condemn it as a copy with no 'true origin', a bricolage, which cobbles together elements from different sources. But the historic national park lodges were themselves a bricolage of different styles. Old Faithful Inn is designed as a 'temple to nature'; it too could be called a simulacrum, as 'real' (or as 'fake') as Wilderness Lodge. Higgs and Cypher argue that Disney is changing what we think about nature and reality itself. They draw in particular on the theories of Albert Borgmann, who argues that 'mediated' (artificial) experiences of nature can never be as satisfying as 'the real thing'. Borgmann, however, constructs his own image or simulacrum of nature and wilderness, as pristine and 'wholly other than technological civilization'. He ignores both the fact that the wilderness has been shaped over centuries by the 'human hand' and the way that our perception of 'nature' is always/already mediated. He evokes the idea of a 'simple life' close to nature, but this idea is based less in 'reality', than in the archetypal image of 'pioneer life' on the North American frontier. The Disney simulacrum does not, as Cypher and Higgs claim, present us with a false image of reality. Rather, it presents image as image. We are invited to play along with a 'game of reality', and imagine that we are living the 'simple life' close to nature. In this way, it exposes the idea of nature as 'the real thing' as, itself, a fantasy.
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Genre trends at the US box office, 1991 to 2010
By Nick RedfernThis article examines genre trends in the top 50 grossing films at the US box office each year from 1991 to 2010, focusing on the frequency and rank of different genres, the box office gross and release patterns of films in different genres, and the release profile of Hollywood studios. The results show a narrowing of the range of genres at the highest rankings, with fantasy/science fiction movies coming to dominate at the expense of comedy, crime/thriller and drama films. There are also marginal increases in action/adventure and family films. Analysis of the opening and total gross for each film reveals that different genres are characterized by different release patterns, and noted the importance of awards in contributing to the box office gross of drama films. With one notable exception, there is no evidence of genre specialization among film studios in contemporary Hollywood cinema.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)