World Of Popular Culture Research Articles

Nobody does it better: Identity, ideology, and the future of James Bond

Objective We explore the possibility that ideology structures attitudes toward casting choices swapping the race, gender, or sexual orientation of existing characters within popular entertainment franchises. Methods We conduct an original survey to gauge reactions to potential swaps within the James Bond film franchise. Results American conservatives are significantly less interested in future Bond films should the main character be played by a black man, a black woman, a white woman, or someone who is gay or a lesbian. This relationship does not hold should the role go to someone under 25 or American. Conclusion Ideology structures attitudes toward the world of popular culture in addition to and in similar ways to the world of politics.

Heroes Sung and Unsung: Explorers’ Narratives of Mongolia, 1890s to the 1930s

Abstract Petr Kuzmich Kozlov and Roy Chapman Andrews were well known figures in the world of popular culture, exploration, and science of their respective homelands, Imperial Russia and America. In the early years of the twentieth century, both were famous for spectacular discoveries in the deserts of Mongolia – Kozlov in archeology and Andrews in paleontology. Both were celebrity explorers in their native countries when they met in Mongolia in 1922, and both kept field journals and notes from which they produced popularly published accounts of their travels and exploits. Like all the great explorer-adventurers, Andrews and Kozlov made themselves the hero of their own narratives (Maclulich 1977). And yet, neither could have achieved what he did, nor likely have met, had it not been for a third individual, one who was indispensable to both explorers, but an individual who has nearly disappeared from the historical record. Tsokto Garmaevich Badmazhapov, a native of Buryatia, in Siberia, acted as an intermediary for both Kozlov and Andrews. He played a central role in the stories of the two explorers, the unsung hero in their narratives, but he was a remarkable individual in his own right – a successful and polyglot commercial agent, a go-between, an explorer, and a Mongolian government official. In the early 1920s all three individuals were prominent figures in Mongolia, and yet by the mid-1930s, all three had been excluded from the lands that drew them. This article explores the interaction of these three, the visions of Inner Asia that motivated and separated each, and the circumstances – scientific, geo-political, and personal – that both produced and then discarded these remarkable people.

Allow me this one time to speak as a Shi’i: The sectarian taboo, music videos and the securitization of sectarian identity politics in Hezbollah’s legitimation of its military involvement in Syria

ABSTRACT The rise of sectarianism in the Middle East has predominantly been explained by realist or soft constructivist approaches. This article offers an alternative poststructuralist reading, analysing sectarianism as a specific, yet ambiguous ethno-religious discourse in which the ‘sectarian taboo’ continues to restrain aggressive forms of sectarian enunciations. Drawing on rare first-hand material and interviews, it is shown how sectarian referents both are securitized, deferred and invoked in Hezbollah’s political discourse legitimizing its warfare in Syria. However, it also suggests that we need to look beyond official discourses, and into the world of popular culture, where religious mythology and music diffuse the boundary between the real and the simulated. In the end, sectarianism may reveal a common post-modern condition of longing for authenticity and solid ground.

A Radical Iconography of the Violin: The Art of the Possible and the Realms of the Improbable

Of all the musical instruments in the classical repertoire, the violin is the most iconic and the most exploited by designers, advertising agencies, conceptual musicians, and visual artists worldwide. This article chronicles how the violin has not only obsessed fine artists throughout the ages (including the avant-garde) but has flooded the world of popular culture, taking in cinema, kitsch objects, and pornography. Examples of these are rife in the Rosenberg Museum founded by Jon Rose, who betrays an eye for the absurd. His Museum collection includes hundreds of found images and objects related to the violin and is also rich in sculpturally modified violins, some of them created by Rose himself—these he has named the Relative Violins. It is typical of the Rosenberg collection that at its most improbable, it is based on hard fact; nothing has been invented; it is in no way a simulacrum or even a virtual museum.

When the Full Moon Rises over the Sunshine State: A Quantitative Evaluation of Queensland Police Calls

IntroductionExamining the lunar hypothesis that human behaviour is affected by the full phase of the moon takes one on an interesting journey through time. The earliest recorded account of this belief can be found during the Hippocratic period, circa 400 BC (Cooke & Coles, 1978). The belief that people become lunatics, or that unusual behaviour or events manifest more frequently when the moon is full, hereinafter referred to as the lunar hypothesis, has been the subject of some research, but much discussion. References to the moon affecting human behaviour are common in the worlds of popular culture, academia, as well as the arts. In the late-1960s, the American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival warned of a bad moon rising (Fogarty, 1969). And, in the 1970s the Jackson Five advised, don't blame it on the moonlight (Jackson, 1978).While some researchers have disputed the validity of the effects of a full moon (Crowe & Miura, 1995; Owens & McGowan, 2006; Russell & Dua, 1983), there are others who have identified a link (Cohen-Mansfield, Marx, & Werna, 1989; Purpura, 1979; Tasso & Miller, 1976; Templer, Veleber, & Brooner, 1982; Thakur & Sharma, 1984). It would seem that there are no definitive answers. There is an organisational-based discourse within the respected professions of psychiatric nursing, policing, and emergency medicine, all supporting the lunar hypothesis (Calver, Stokes, & Isbister, 2009; Rotton & Kelly, 1985b) and the topic has held academic and public interest for a considerable period.In dismissing the beliefs of mental health professionals, police, and emergency workers, some researchers rationalise the anecdotal evidence as illusory correlation; the tendency to overestimate a relationship between two variables where, in fact, none exists (Gorvin & Roberts, 1994). Attributing beliefs of a lunar effect on human behaviour, is like grounding such a position in little more than the tapestry of folklore associated with the topic (Bickis, Kelly, & Byrnes, 1995, p. 701).TheoryIn respect of the lunar hypothesis, it is argued that there are two dominate theories; yet both are attenuated by a paucity of rigorous scientific investigation. The two theoretical positions this paper puts forward are termed gravity (i.e., human tide) and the other luminosity. Scholars appear to have been content to have examined the lunar hypothesis for close to a century (Cooke and Coles, 1978), more intent upon identifying or quantifying lunacy, than identifying causes associated with the phenomenon. By way of example, Barr (2000) lamented that a change to this situation was still some time away:Researchers do not agree on exactly what effect they are looking for or whether it is only likely to occur in certain individuals. These problems stem from the absence of a widely accepted theoretical base which could account for any supposed lunar effect on [subjects]. Unfortunately, there is little sign this situation will change in the ... future (Barr, 2000).With the two theories-gravity and luminosity-displaying varying degrees of scientific credibility sufficient enough to encourage an observer to reconsider or suspend immediate dismissal of the lunar hypothesis, there are other scientific facts that contradict these theories. Mathematical formulae are used to calculate and quantify the additional forces of gravity experienced by a person at the time of a full moon. Likewise, comparisons can be made between full moon luminosity and common events that make support for either theory problematic at best.Rotton and Kelly (1985, p. 289) brought science to bear on the lunar hypothesis by noting that the gravitational effect of the full moon upon a person is the equivalent of that exerted by a drop of sweat or a flea upon the person's skin. Additionally, they point out that the earth's gravitational pull upon a person is 5,012 times that exerted by the full moon, yet no behavioural phenomena are attributed to such a force (Rotton& Kelly, 1985: 289). …

“The picture of a woman”: roaring girls and alternative histories in the RSC 2014 season

In staging the personal histories of transgressive early modern women alongside Shakespeare's history plays, the RSC 2014 season presented an alternative version of history. Although the narratives portrayed in both Arden of Faversham (1592) and Webster's The White Devil (1612) can be found in chronicle sources, neither belongs to the conventional register of history; indeed, Holinshed apologised for the inclusion in his Chronicles (1577, 1587) of such ‘private’ matter as Arden's murder by his wife. Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl (1611) and The Witch of Edmonton (1621) are likewise rooted in the world of popular culture: the “Roaring Girl” Moll Cutpurse was chronicled in John Day's chapbook The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside (1610), now lost, while Ford, Dekker and Rowley borrow from Henry Goodcole's trial account A Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer (1621). This article explores how the “Roaring Girls” season challenged traditional generic divisions between ‘high’ Shakespeare histories and the popular genres of domestic tragedy and city comedy. I discuss how the RSC directors used these early modern plays and their subversive female protagonists to respond to gender inequality in contemporary society, engaging with the concerns of Fourth Wave feminism by staging “roaring girls” who challenge societal strictures and unsettle conservative images of gender. I argue that in staging plays which privilege the portrayal of criminal women, the 2014 “Roaring Girls” season restored the hidden histories of both the popular source material that informed the drama of the early modern stage, and the women who become visible to history only through their transgressions.

TRANSFORMING GOD-LANGUAGE: THE METAPHOR OF GOD AS ABUSIVE SPOUSE (EZEKIEL 16) IN CONVERSATION WITH THE PORTRAYAL OF GOD IN THE COLOR PURPLE

In probably one of the most disturbing texts in the Hebrew Bible, God is imaged in Ezekiel 16 (and 23) in terms of the metaphor of an Abusive Spouse (cf. also Hosea 1-2 and Jeremiah 2-3). In view of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians’ concer n regarding the impact of violent (sacred) texts in a context of violence against women and children, I propose that Ezekiel 16 in all of its shock value offers a powerful teaching opportunity to raise awareness regarding a number of important issues such as the nature of God-language, the reality of sexual violence, and the impact of gender and race when it comes to interpreting the biblical witness. From experience, though, this text is not the easiest to teach. When teaching on difficult topics such as exemplified by this text from Ezekiel, I have found that it helps students to enter the topic by means of a creative interjection coming from the world of popular culture. This essay will bring into conversation the God-language in Ezekiel 16 with the portrayal of God in Alice Walker’s novel ‘The Color Purple’ (1982), which tells, in the form of letters to God, the story of a young African-American woman, Celie, who is the victim of rape by her abusive, domineering father. A creative engagement between Ezeki el 16 and ‘The Color Purple' that asks critical questions about the nature of God-language and how it relates to a situation of physical and sexual abuse may offer some intriguing possibilities for teaching on this difficult topic – in particular raising awareness about the multi-faceted phenomenon of violence against women.

Mesečina, slavci in sanje o Havajih – referenčni sistemi »kiča« v nemškem glasbenem kabaretu pozne Weimarske republike

Kabaret in popularna kultura weimarske republike sta dokaz o popolnoma sodobnem odnosu do kiča, ki zasenči slabšalne eseje o degeneracijskem vplivu kiča. To je prikazano na primeru dela »Kitsch-Tango« Friedricha Hollaenderja, napisanega za kabaretsko revijo, in referenčnih sistemov, na katere se nanaša pesem – na svet popularne kulture in znanje o vrednotenju določenih klišejev, ki jih je akademski svet takrat označeval kot kič.

Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth‐Century Literature and Victorian Studies

AbstractUntil very recently, critical attention to literary relations and aesthetic exchanges between Britain and China in the 19th century has been scant. However with the current shifting of focus in Victorian studies away from canonical, mainstream concerns toward the disenfranchised people and productions that inhabited the vibrant, often carnivalesque, world of popular culture, China has made its way – if not into the floodlights – at least into the well‐lit recesses of literary‐critical consciousness. This essay provides both an overview of China’s pervasive influence on British life and letters in the 19th century as well as an assessment of scholarship in the developing field of Sino‐British studies. Aside from surveying a number of approaches to this relatively new field of inquiry, I suggest that past critical neglect of 19th‐century, Sino‐British literary relations is, in one part, residual from the seemingly dismissive, at times sinophobic, and overwhelmingly negative attitudes of the Victorians toward China and, in another part, to China’s awkward situation within a dominant theoretical framework of Orientalism that largely fails to account for the cultural and historical nuances of its special relations with the West. In offering an overview both of China’s appearance in Victorian literature and of the developing field of Sino‐British studies, this essay aims not only to draw attention to a previously overlooked aspect of Victorian literature and culture but to suggest the vital revisions of critical perspective occasioned by its exploration.

Marketing hedonics: Toward a psychoanalysis of advertising response

The author advances a psychoanalytic theory of advertising response to theorize the intersection of brand positioning, the semiotics of gender, and consumer desire in advertising discourse. Researchers traditionally focus on the iconic representation of desire in advertising imagery. However, by drawing upon Lacan's theory of scopophelia, the author focuses on the dialectical implication of the spectator/consumer's psychic drives in the visual semiotics of advertising discourse. The consumer identifies with the brand discourse primarily by means of projective identification with the voyeuristic gaze of the camera referenced in the image, and only secondarily because of perceived parallels between consumer lifestyle and the content of the advertisement. By way of illustration, the author analyzes the positioning of consumer desire in homoerotic advertising for Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana, which draws upon resistance discourses in contemporary art to hold the consumer in a passion play of alternative sexualities and subject positions. Though these campaigns deconstruct the conventional binary opposition of male voyeur/female object of the gaze, they have contributed to the broad popularity of these brands because the brand discourse – logo, product placement, and rhetoric – restores a conventional logic to these advertisements that would have been censored from the worlds of popular culture and fine art.

Pop (Culture) Goes the Organization: On Highbrow, Lowbrow and Hybrids in Studying Popular Culture Within Organization Studies

Do we need to study popular culture within organization studies, and exactly what is it we do if we choose to do so? Is it nothing more than organizational scholars co-opting yet another discipline, or is there an independent contribution to be made? I will in this text argue that in order to develop, organization studies must find its own identity in relation to cultural studies, and that the search for this must by necessity include the study of hybrid cultural forms. Such forms, which are neither highbrow nor properly lowbrow, challenge common assumptions about what `popular' in fact means in the field, and points towards the need for a more complex theory of how images of management and organization are consumed, disseminated and re-created from the world of popular culture into the world of the contemporary organization and back again.

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America

My research into the “Mormon Question” has blurred disciplinary boundaries, demonstrating that legal history occurs outside the confines of law books, out in the world of popular culture, political cartooning, and sermonizing, and even in outbreaks of violence. This article is designed to illustrate how an entire body of constitutional law was made in opposition to the marital and sexual arrangements of Mormons in the Utah Territory in the nineteenth century.

Not the nine o'clock service: Using children's culture

This paper discusses current thinking and practice about the use of popular culture in the primary school to teach literacy. It attempts to question the methods that attempt to galvanise children's interest in popular texts to teach the current literacy curriculum. It argues that there is an incompatibility between the pleasures and practices of the world of popular culture and the traditional environment and curricula of school. The paper argues that instead of ‘using’ children's culture to teach the literacy curriculum in school, children's vibrant, sophisticated and valuable culture needs to be embedded within it.

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth‐Century America

My research into the “Mormon Question” has blurred disciplinary boundaries, demonstrating that legal history occurs outside the confines of law books, out in the world of popular culture, political cartooning, and sermonizing, and even in outbreaks of violence. This article is designed to illustrate how an entire body of constitutional law was made in opposition to the marital and sexual arrangements of Mormons in the Utah Territory in the nineteenth century.

We shall Fight on the Seas and the Oceans…We shall

We shall Fight on the Seas and the Oceans…We shall

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America SARAH BARRINGER GORDON My research into the “Mormon Question” has blurred disciplinary boundaries, demonstrat­ ing that legal history occurs outside the confines of law books, out in the world of popular culture, political cartooning, and sermonizing, and even in outbreaks of violence. This article is designed to illustrate how an entire body of constitutional law was made in opposition to the marital and sexual arrangements of Mormons in the Utah Territory in the nineteenth century. The Mormon Question tied together ques­ tions ofreligion, law, and the perceived sexual enslavement of women in a tantalizing mix. Many Americans in the nineteenth century were intrigued, dismayed, and ultimately per­ suaded that Mormon men were dangerous to the women they married. They also believed that polygamy was a threat to the entire politi­ cal and constitutional system.1 Opponents of polygamy claimed that Mormon plural marriage was, in essence, a political and legal question. They imagined Mormon men, especially, as violent and de­ fiant. A political cartoon from the 1880s, for example, depicted a Mormon atop a platform labeled “polygamy,” shaking his fist at a cow­ ardly Congress, with his wives chained at the neck and labeled like so many cattle. Needless to say, this kind ofattack was painful in the ex­ treme to Mormons, who claimed thatthey were misunderstood by the rest ofthe country.2 The arguments made on both sides of the debate over polygamy were complex and changed over time, and I can only go into a few ofthe many fascinating venues ofthe con­ flict. For the purposes of this article, the key point is that the combatants ranged across gen­ res and into multiple fields ofconflict, forcing our gaze as lawyers out beyond the bounds of doctrine, teaching us once again that constitu­ tional theory and legal doctrine are rich sources of cultural insight: they are the stuff of great stories. This story begins with religious faith. Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called THE MORMON QUESTION 15 i x t i y r o c a a'. —• -v • w. ■ M» » ii-t' - .«»•' i t‘This 1880s political cartoon from The Judge depicts a Mormon atop a platform labeled “polygamy” (on the supporting pole), shaking his fist at a cowardly Congress. His wives are chained at the neck and labeled like cattle. 16 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY the Mormon Church, in 1830. He was the sect’s Prophet, its firstpresident, and the translator of the “golden plates,” which, he reported, were revealed to him by an angel. He was known in upstate New York as a counterfeiter, fortune­ teller, and treasure hunter.3 And yet Smith’s in­ spiration forever changed his world and drew a following whose faith was severely tested by scorn and persecution. Smith not only pub­ lished the Book of Mormon—a new revela­ tion that placed America at the center of re­ ligious history—but also embraced a concept of ongoing revelation in the “latter days.” The new covenant between God and his servant Joseph Smith assured followers that they were part ofa glorious cosmic plan, which was grad­ ually unfolded for their exaltation and, ulti­ mately, for the salvation ofthe world.4 Mormonism was bom in a society satu­ rated with religious messages. Smith under­ stood that he and his followers were enmeshed in what he called a “war of words” among Christians, and he claimed that his new revela­ tion was the only uncorrupted and truly Chris­ tian Word of God.5 The Mormon Church quickly acquired passionate adherents and equally passionate opponents. Everywhere they went, Mormons excited the enmity of their neighbors. The story is a complex one, and involves charges of violence on both sides, but there can be no doubt that Mormons suffered greatly. In 1838, seventeen men and boys were killed by local residents in what is known as the Mas­ sacre at Haun’s Mill, Missouri. The governorof Missouri called for the expulsion of all Mor­ mons from the state; officials in other states were less explicit, but let Mormons know that they could not rely on state...

Tragedies of tyrants: political thought and theater in the English Renaissance (review)

142 Reviews materials might easily have been included as suitable for treatment The fact that such thoughts spring readily to mind, however, could be considered a real strength of this book. Like his seminal books explicating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1965), discovering a major literary grouping in the 'Ricardian' poets (1971), pinpointing the distinctive characteristics of Middle English literature at large (1982), this is in turn almost certain to generate a new series of studies. If 'formal doctrines' of the ages of M a n belong to the world of 'a lettered minority' such as Dante and Chaucer, for instance (p. 93 and passim), what informal understandings of the human life-span are to be found in the world of popular culture? Diane Speed Department of English University of Sydney Bushnell, Rebecca W., Tragedies of tyrants: political thought and theater in the English Renaissance, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xviii, 195; R.R.P. US$29.95 + 1 0 % overseas. Professor Bushnell's study begins by examining h o w politically focused writings from antiquity to the Renaissance variously constructed images of the tyrant. It then proceeds to explore how English Renaissance drama recreated and/or redefined those images. Vigorously, learnedly, and lucidly argued, her book further illuminates not merely individual texts but also the Tudor and Stuart debates over the nature and scope of monarchic power. Thefirsttwo chapters investigate an 'ideology of opposition' that Bushnell sees as 'constructing the tyrant's unstable figure in the tradition of western political thought that stems from Plato and Aristotle' (p. 9). Bushnell demonstrates that the tyrant in contrast to the king-as-true-ruler, is repeatedly represented as being passion dominated, effeminate, theatrical: one whose self, in its egocentric, frequently overreaching, desire and in its diverse transformations, moves toward dissolution. Bushnell's point is that '[t]he tyrant thus draws to himself everything that does notfitquite properly into the Western tradition of rationality' (ibid.). Of particular importance in the widely ranging discussion that substantiates her point is the focus on effeminacy as a supposed characteristic of tyrants. Ancient and Renaissance constructions of the female in terms of unreason, uncontrolled desire, instability and the impulse to illegitimate mie are shrewdly scrutinized. Important too is Bushnell's focus on political theory's recunent unwillingness, or failure, to keep the categories 'tyrant' and 'king' distinct. It might finally be mentioned here that an attractive feature of the initial chapters is Bushnell's moving beyond canonical texts of political theory. Her account of Senecan images of tyranny is valuable, the more so as she has previously examined Oedipus the King. Reviews 143 In the following chapters' accounts of Tudor and Stuart tyrant plays, many substantial as well as new readings are put forward, early and notable successes being the interpretations of Cambyses and of Baptistes in the third chapter. It might be argued, however, that the subsequent chapter's accounts of Shakespeare's and Jonson's tyrant plays are less successful. The readings of Richard 111 and of Macbeth are interesting: 'In Richard's and Macbeth's cases, we see how gender and sexuality can be used to construct and undermine the tyrant because w e watch those characters ambitiously seek to become kings and then mie unsuccessfully' (p. 131). Even more so is the study of Sejanus, in which Bushnell suggests that the play 'approaches the problem of representing the ambitious tyrant by splitting him into two figures: Sejanus the usurper and Tiberius the legitimate emperor, "excellent wolf (3.347) and "sphinx" (3.64)' (ibid.). Nonetheless, the plays are not adequately contextualized within the other writings of their respective authors. H o w Sejanus, for example, relates to Jonson's images of kingship in his masques and poems is left unexplored. Better contextualized, in that sense, is the account in chapter five of Beaumont and Fletcher's tyrant plays, a discussion in which Bushnell carefully examines apparent support of 'the absolutist ideology that privileges legitimacy over character as an index ofrightfulrule' and its seeming co-existence with apparent criticism of 'absolutism's exclusion of morality from political discourse' (p. 171). The ensuing study of Massinger's The Roman Actor...

The ages of man: a study in medieval writing and thought (review)

Reviews 141 Burrow, J. A., The ages of man: a study in medieval writing and thought, rpt, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988; paper; pp. 211; frontispiece plus 12 plates; R.R.P. AUS$32. Bunow's book wasfirstpublished in the same year (1986) as two others which are, like his, concerned with medieval concepts of the ages of M a n and their manifestations in literature and art: The perfect age ofMan's life, by Mary Dove, who shares with B u n o w a particular interest in manifestations of the theme in medieval English literature, although she concentrates on one specific age, and The ages of Man: medieval interpretations of the life cycle, by Elizabeth Sears, which ranges rather more widely through the visual arts and through Europe (both reviewed in Parergon 1 (1989) 119-20 and 150-52, respectively). There is, predictably, a degree of overlap amongst the books, along with acknowledgements of assistance given by one author to another, but there is also considerable variation in approach as well as scope, and all three have been broadly welcomed by the academic community for drawing attention, in their respective ways, to a persistent discourse in the intellectual and creative life of the European Middle Ages. The special virtue of Burrow's book is the clarity and logic of his presentation, making this the most accessible of the three as an introduction to the subject apart from offering its share of hermeneutic interest in respect of individual works. The fact that it alone has been issued in paperback indicates an expectation, well enough founded, that it will be purchased by individual scholars and students as well as by libraries and refened to again and again. The first two chapters trace the origin and development of the schemes in which ideas about the ages reached medieval writers and artists: first, the scientific or 'natural' schemes of biologists, physiologists, and astrologers, which distinguished, respectively, three, four, or seven ages in the full life-span, and second, the temporal schemes espoused by preachers, exegetes, and historians, the most prominent of which distinguished six ages analogous to the supposed six ages of the world. The remaining two chapters explore the treatment of these 'norms* in particular medieval narratives, according to whether the assumed ideal is transcendance of the norm or conformity to it. A short appendix provides a convenient means of consulting loci classici in the original Latin and translation. Bunow's experience shows especially in his humane understanding of the concepts involved, his ability to see such things from the perspective of a medieval scholar and to communicate his insights in terms that are meaningful to both specialist and generalist in medieval studies. Questions can be raised about some points of detail (see particularly the review of the original publication by H. A. Kelly, Speculum 63 (1988) 630-34) and as in any case where a potentially vast topic has been surveyed in a relatively small space other 142 Reviews materials might easily have been included as suitable for treatment The fact that such thoughts spring readily to mind, however, could be considered a real strength of this book. Like his seminal books explicating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1965), discovering a major literary grouping in the 'Ricardian' poets (1971), pinpointing the distinctive characteristics of Middle English literature at large (1982), this is in turn almost certain to generate a new series of studies. If 'formal doctrines' of the ages of M a n belong to the world of 'a lettered minority' such as Dante and Chaucer, for instance (p. 93 and passim), what informal understandings of the human life-span are to be found in the world of popular culture? Diane Speed Department of English University of Sydney Bushnell, Rebecca W., Tragedies of tyrants: political thought and theater in the English Renaissance, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xviii, 195; R.R.P. US$29.95 + 1 0 % overseas. Professor Bushnell's study begins by examining h o w politically focused writings from antiquity to the Renaissance variously constructed images of the tyrant. It then proceeds to explore how English Renaissance drama recreated and/or redefined those...