Books in the Polygons: Cultural Diversities and Intersections series

Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults who should know better,A" in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the ninth artA" and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting, and cinema. The bande dessinee [comic strip] has its own national institutions and regularly obtains front-page coverage.

Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorize and divide along culturally constructed lines.

The relationship between language and various kinds of non-linguistic behavior has been of great fascination for many of those working in the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy, or, broadly understood, cultural studies. The authors in this volume explore this relationship in a number of cultures and social contexts...

Exile is the dominant theme of our times. It can be found in the forced migration of populations but also in the temporal, cultural and physical alienation of the individual''s experiences of the postmodern world. This is a world of unstable, shifting identities dominated, and perhaps most acutely expressed by, the fluidity of the visual image. The essays in this volume examine issues such as remembering and forgetting trauma and nostalgia, time and space, social and sexual exclusion in relation to visual media and new technologies, cinema and the visual arts. The multi-facetted and interdisciplinary exploration of exile and displacement - whether geographical, temporal, corporeal or performative - provides an important analysis of a significant and fascinating aspect of contemporary culture.

In this highly original approach to the study of the construction of culture, this collection of previously unpublished essays explore the topography of the secret and the forbidden, focusing on specific moments in recent cultural and political history.

The Third Republic, known as the ''belle époque'', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women''s history.Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published widely on French women writers, including Colette, Rachilde, Renée Vivien, and bestselling romantic authors of the Belle Epoque. Her recent publications include Rachilde - Decadence Gender and the Woman Writer (Berg, 2001), and she is working on a study of romance in 20th century France.Carrie Tarr is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kingston University London. She has published extensively on gender and ethnicity in French cinema. Her recent publications include Cinema and the Second Sex: Women''s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and1990s (with B. Rollet, 2001) and Reframing Difference: beur and banlieue cinema in France (2005).

Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena?

Considers the cultural power of magic, from early Christianity and the ancient Mediterranean to the film career of Buffalo Bill, focusing on topics such as Surrealism, France in the classical age, alchemy, and American fundamentalism. This book ranges from theory to practice, from demonology to exoticism, and from the magic of memory to stage.

There are many stories featuring the villainous hero Reynard the Fox in many languages told over many centuries, goingback as far as the early 12th century. All these stories are comic and much of the humour depends on parody and satire resulting in mockery, sometimes the subversion of certain kinds of serious literature...

The Third Republic, known as the 'belle epoque', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France. This book explores almost all these facets of the period, weaving them into a multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history.

The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. This title includes an examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, which offers an insight into the shifts that took place. It explores stardom from the domain of cinema and other fields.

Showing how in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and the South Pacific, radio provides distinctive forms of content for the individual listener, this volume also shows how it enables ethnic and cultural groups to maintain their sense of identity. It suggests that the benefits and gratifications which radio confers remain unique.

In this highly original approach to the study of the construction of culture, this collection of previously unpublished essays explore the topography of the secret and the forbidden, focusing on specific moments in recent cultural and political history.