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This collection appraises an eclectic selection of programmes, exploring and weighing their particular achievements and their contribution to the television landscape. It does so via a simultaneous engagement with the concepts of complexity and simplicity. This book considers how complexity, which is currently attracting much interest in TV studies, impacts upon the practice of critical and evaluative interpretation. It engages reflectively and critically with a range of recent work on televisual complexity, expands existing conceptions of complex TV and directs attention to neglected sources and types of complexity. It also reassesses simplicity, a relatively neglected category in TV criticism, as a helpful criterion for evaluation. It seeks out and reappraises the importance of simple qualities to particular TV works, and explores how simplicity might be revalued as a potentially positive and valuable aesthetic feature. Finally, the book illuminates the creative achievements that arise from balancing simplicity with complexity.
The contributors to this collection come from diverse areas of TV studies, bringing with them myriad interests, expertise and perspectives. All chapters undertake close analysis of selected moments in television, considering a wide range of stylistic elements including mise-en-scène, spatial organisation and composition, scripting, costuming, characterisation, performance, lighting and sound design, colour and patterning. The range of television works addressed is similarly broad, covering UK and US drama, comedy-drama, sitcom, animation, science fiction, adaptation and advertisement. Programmes comprise The Handmaid’s Tale, House of Cards, Father Ted, Rick and Morty, Killing Eve, The Wire, Veep, Doctor Who, Vanity Fair and The Long Wait.
the generous pile of presents at its foot, and retrieves a large, wrapped parcel from his wardrobe, carrying it with care along the landing and into his parents’ bedroom. Smiling, the boy extends the gift to his bleary-eyed parents. As Campaign 's laudatory appraisal underlines, simplicity (‘a simple, wonderful thought’) has long been commended in advertising, in view of its perceived advantage in selling products and creating strong brand recognition. The Long Wait was created as part of John Lewis's wider marketing strategy. John Lewis
in Killing Eve , this chapter demonstrates that elements of style and mise-en-scène also play an important role in establishing the balance between simplicity and complexity in a television drama. We speak of ‘simplicity’ when we easily understand entirely what we see. Since costume design more often than not instantly tells us who characters are and how we, whether consciously or not, are to perceive them, we can call it ‘simple’ if what the costume says is indeed all it means. This does not necessarily mean that it is an unnoticeable look, or that there is not a
This article examines English Evangelical novels focused on the conversion of Jewish characters, published from the 1820s to the 1850s. It concentrates particularly on the way these novels emphasised the importance of the Church of England in constructing national and religious identity, and used Jewish conversion as a way to critique Catholicism and Nonconformity. Jewish worship, rabbinic authority and Talmudic devotion were linked to Roman Catholic attitudes towards priesthood and tradition, while Jews were also portrayed as victims of a persecuting Roman Church. Nonconformity was criticised for disordered worship and confusing Jews with its attacks on respectable Anglicanism. As a national religion, novelists therefore imagined that Jews would be saved by a national church, and often linked this to concepts of a national restoration to Palestine. This article develops and complicates understandings of Evangelical views of Jews in the nineteenth century, and their links to ‘writing the nation’ in popular literature.
This book surveys ‘thrift’ through its moral, religious, ethical, political, spiritual and philosophical expressions, focusing in on key moments such as the early Puritans and postwar rationing, and key characters such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Smiles and Henry Thoreau. The relationships between thrift and frugality, mindfulness, sustainability and alternative consumption practices are explained, and connections made between myriad conceptions of thrift and contemporary concerns for how consumer cultures impact scarce resources, wealth distribution and the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the book returns the reader to an understanding of thrift as it was originally used – to ‘thrive’ – and attempts to re-cast thrift in more collective, economically egalitarian terms, reclaiming it as a genuinely resistant practice. Students, scholars and general readers across all disciplines and interest areas will find much of interest in this book, which provides a multi-disciplinary look at a highly topical concept.
This collection appraises an eclectic selection of programmes, exploring and weighing their particular achievements and their contribution to the TV landscape. It does this via a simultaneous engagement with a ‘binary’: in this case, complexity/simplicity. Our aim is to explore further the notion of complexity , with particular consideration of how it impacts upon the practice of critical and evaluative interpretation. We also wish to reweigh and reassess simplicity as a potential, relatively neglected, criterion for evaluation in
92 7 Ecological thrift: frugality, de-​growth and Voluntary Simplicity Thrift as a tool for de-​growth Discourses around frugality and the environment are by no means new, and voices from across academic disciplines call for thrift from a broadly ecological standpoint, and have done for many decades. Several well-​researched and bestselling reports on the threatened state of the global environment saw public awareness grow from the 1970s onwards. Key amongst these was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (1972
chap 3.qxd 2/2/06 2:00 pm Page 108 3 The art of love The publication of Written on the Body in 1992 marked a change from the structural complexity of Sexing the Cherry, with its duplications and intertwining of narrative voices and historical periods, by turning back to the simplicity of the single narrative voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. However, as in Winterson’s first novel, this simplicity is more apparent than real; in the case of Written on the Body because the gender and physical aspect of the autodiegetic narrator are never made explicit
scatological writing in a kind of carnivalesque tradition. This is a simple form, but it is difficult to maintain such simplicity because the language is meant to be delivered in short bursts, not over seven years. The temporal stretching of the work maximises the tension between little moments of comic simplicity and moments of extreme emotional and performative complexity (Fridja 1988 ). Veep 's coarse and often obscene language, along with its infantile and pithy structure, may not appear to aim for emotional complexity but attains it due to Louis-Dreyfus's performance
the need to distance himself stylistically as well as morally from the rest, which were, as discussed earlier, politically charged. He had no need to fit himself into the accepted form of pastoral landscape, with its uncomfortable juxtapositions of social anxieties imported from the Court and simple, honest shepherd-songsters. He did not need to adopt the semblance of rustic simplicity to give him moral authority, he was a