Steven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

Steven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don’t know the exact relationship between people’s political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British political system will be insufficient without understanding how it has been imagined and depicted. Indeed, as later chapters show, the mode of depiction itself has become an important territory for explaining British political culture. The book contains a huge range of examples, from the more well known television series, such as Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, through to obscure and perhaps forgotten books such asThe Mistress of Downing Street. Overall it will be of interest to academics and the public alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Episoder(2163)

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as An...

14 Jan 1h 18min

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defi...

13 Jan 56min

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is er...

13 Jan 1h 4min

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extol...

12 Jan 56min

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativ...

10 Jan 57min

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the...

9 Jan 40min

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified c...

8 Jan 51min

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is so...

7 Jan 45min

Populært innen Vitenskap

fastlegen
tingenes-tilstand
rekommandert
jss
rss-rekommandert
sinnsyn
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
villmarksliv
fjellsportpodden
forskningno
rss-paradigmepodden
rss-overskuddsliv
pod-britannia
tidlose-historier
dekodet-2
rss-skogkurs-podden
rss-nysgjerrige-norge
vett-og-vitenskap-med-gaute-einevoll
kvinnehelsepodden
hva-er-greia-med