Angela carter’s heroes and villains: a dystopian romance

The present paper modestly attempts to study Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969) as a dystopian romance in apocalyptic mode .It is an attempt to present how Angela Carter critically examines Rousseau’s Utopia of Noble Savage in Heroes and Villains. Carter juxtaposed Rousseau’s concept of ‘Noble Savage’ with the Barbarian Jewel, who does not represent natural ‘goodness of man’ and ‘perfectibility’ which are the merits attributed by Rousseau to his noble savage. Carter debunks the romantic idea of a ‘Noble Savage’ as well as an idyllic picture of the countryside, outside the walls of civilization. Carter scrutinizes Rousseau’s utopian idea of Noble Savage and also shows how the western Enlightenment concept of Binarism to establish identity of the privileged group is misleading as well as responsible for mistrust and harmful conflict between communities. Angela Carter combines dystopia with subversion of the genre of romance in Heroes and Villains. It encodes ‘female values’ of love and relatedness as well as ‘male aggressiveness’ and competition. The paper concludes that Angela Carter examines Rousseau’s utopian notion of Noble Savage as well as his notion of the ideal womanhood in Heroes and Villains. She has created a kind of laboratory world in which there are only three communities, the Professors, the Barbarians and the Savages. It is in this post-apocalyptic futurist world that she examines the utopian ideas of Rousseau. She subverts the romantic notion of love, courtship and manners that categorize popular romances

A Wilde scoundrel: Villainy and “Lad Culture” in the filmic afterlives of Dorian Gray

Neo-Victorian Villains offers a varied and stimulating range of essays on the afterlives of Victorian villains in popular culture, exploring their representation and adaptation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction

Playing Devil\u27s Advocate: The Attractive Shakespearean Villain

The characters of William Shakespeare have spawned countless words of critical interpretation inspired by the playwright\u27s aptitude for fashioning intricate and conflicted figures. As a master character craftsman, Shakespeare is consistent in creating fascinatingly deep characters, and many of them have even gone so far as to generate entire literary archetypes. From the contemplative Prince Hamlet to the despicable yet charming John Falstaff, Shakespeare\u27s characters remain eternal representatives of what any good character should be: interesting, provocative, and complicated. However, among the playwright\u27s most hypnotic figures are his villains, those characters whom audiences should by all counts detest but cannot help but find alluring. Some of these villains have attracted more critical attention than others. For instance, Iago, the scheming fiend of Othello, has forever mesmerized audiences and critics alike with his almost supernatural penchant for evil. Other villains, like the passionate firebrand of 1 Henry IV, Henry Hotspur Percy, are perhaps less discussed but still produce an equally ambivalent response from their audiences. This thesis specifically aims to answer two questions. First, what makes these villains attractive to their readers and viewers? Why do they produce such a strongly ambivalent response from their audiences--how do they manage to simultaneously repel and attract us? More importantly, however, the thesis speculates on Shakespeare\u27s reasons for creating such captivating antagonists. In other words, what was the playwright trying to do by forging villains whom we have no choice but to admire? The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which will focus on a particular villain from Shakespeare\u27s plays: Hotspur from 1 Henry IV, Iago from Othello, Richard from Richard III, and Macbeth from Macbeth. While these are by no means the only Shakespearean villains worthy of critical assessment, nor are they the playwright\u27s only attractive villains, they do nonetheless serve as prime examples of how Shakespeare uses the archetype of the attractive villain to some dramatic end. Each chapter will first explore the ways in which that character is particularly alluring, and then it will move into a consideration of Shakespeare\u27s intent in producing the uncannily attractive villain. Additionally, each chapter will conclude by supposing the villain to be a figurehead for a hypothetical class of literary villains. For example, one villain could represent a class of villains who are attractive because of their ambition; another could represent villains who entice audiences through their mystery. To that end, the chapters will conclude by offering additional members of that class from other popular literary works, some from before Shakespeare, some from after Shakespeare, and some from his contemporary authors. The goal of this thesis is to explore the archetype of the attractive villain and to offer reasons for Shakespeare\u27s apparent fondness--and aptitude--for it. While the goal of any academic endeavor should always be discovery, it need not always find one satisfactory answer--rare is the academic pursuit that ends in certainty. However, by delving into the worlds of these villains, by playing a bit of devil\u27s advocate in analyzing Shakespeare\u27s elaborate characterization process, we can discover what makes them such effective and eternal members among the great personalities of literature

We don't choose whom we love:Predictors for romantic attraction to villains

INTRODUCTION: Why are women (not) romantically attracted to dark personalities or villains, which might be a risk factor for intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization? In the current study, it is opted to investigate how adult attachment, maladaptive personality traits, and acceptance of couple violence in women predict romantic attraction to heroic/villainous characters using structural equation modeling (SEM). METHOD: First, a pilot study was conducted in 122 heterosexual women (aged 16–25) to select male TV characters. This resulted in the selection of six villains and 10 heroes for the main study, in which 194 other heterosexual women (aged 16–25) were asked to rate the pictures of TV characters through an online questionnaire. This was combined with self-report measures of maladaptive personality traits, acceptance of couple violence, and adult attachment. These variables were entered into a SEM model to assess model fit. RESULTS: Overall, women rated heroes higher on physical appearance (pilot study) and romantic attraction (main study) compared to villains. We found different direct effects of avoidant (negative) and anxious (positive) attachment styles on romantic attraction to heroes. Moreover, maladaptive personality traits fully mediated the positive effect of avoidant attachment style on romantic attraction to villains. DISCUSSION: Despite the limitations of the study design (e.g., low N, low notoriety of the TV characters), this study emphasizes that women are generally more romantically attracted to heroes (vs. villains). Besides, there are different predictors of romantic attraction to heroes and villains, which requires further investigation, especially in the context of IPV

Heroes and villains of world history across cultures

© 2015 Hanke et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedEmergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.This research was supported by grant RG016-P-10 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (http://www.cckf.org.tw/). Religion Culture Entropy China Democracy Economic histor

Correctly finger-pointing the Lisbon-process-villains

The European Union’s center-piece of economic policy making is the Lisbon process, which tries to make Europe the most competitive economic region in the world economy by 2010. EU Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso recently presented a Centre for European Reform (CER) study that maintained that Denmark, Sweden and Austria are the best performing Lisbon process countries for 2005 and that Romania, Poland and Malta are the lowest ranked countries in the European Union in the same year. Due to lacking data, practically no serious conclusions can be drawn about Turkey. In the study, presented by the Commission President, some real finger pointing is made, with the “good” performers being called “heroes” and the “bad performers” being called “villains”. In the study, Poland was made the European chief “villain” (henceforth called, in keeping with this tendency towards abbreviations in the eurocracy, the ECV, for 2005). Our rigorous re-analysis of the data leads us to the conclusion that the ECV, i.e. the country characterized by past bad cumulated performance, and having no real prospect of things getting better is not Poland but Portugal. It emerges once again that the Lisbon process is in a dire state of affairsEuropean Union; Lisbon process; European integration; policy reform

'Avarice’ and ‘evil doers’: profiteers, politicians, and popular fiction in the 1920s

This article examines the depiction of the profiteer as villain within popular low and middlebrow British novels from the 1920s. It argues that concerns with profiteering persisted in the landscape of popular fiction well after the end of World War I in works by authors such as H.C. McNeile and Warwick Deeping among others. The figure of the profiteering villain embodied anxieties about profiteering, food shortages, and 'big business' during a period of intense economic and political instability, while further allowing the ex-soldier to be simultaneously re-imagined after the war as a heroic breadwinner and soldier

Antirationalist critique or fifth column of scientism? Challenges from Doctor Who to the mad scientist trope

Much of the public understanding of science literature dealing with fictional scientists claims that scientist villains by their nature embody an antiscience critique. I characterize this claim and its founding assumptions as the “mad scientist” trope. I show how scientist villain characters from the science fiction television series Doctor Who undermine the trope via the programme’s use of rhetorical strategies similar to Gilbert and Mulkay’s empiricist and contingent repertoires, which define and patrol the boundaries between “science” and “non-science.” I discuss three such strategies, including the literal framing of scientist villains as “mad.” All three strategies exclude the characters from science, relieve science of responsibility for their villainy, and overtly or covertly contribute to the delivery of pro-science messages consistent with rationalist scientism. I focus on scientist villains from the most popular era of Doctor Who, the mid 1970s, when the show embraced the gothic horror genre