In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

The various names given to the new theatre movement that emerged in the 1960s to challenge both the West End and the new subsidised theatre sector include ‘fringe’, ‘alternative’, and ‘underground’; each offers different aesthetic, social, political, and other definitions of what this theatre movement means. This chapter traces the modern precursors of the movement and the cultural forces that fed into its concerns, forms, and methods, before examining three companies as case studies: Portable Theatre, the Pip Simmons Group, and Monstrous Regiment. Through close analysis of each company’s history, the chapter explore some key features of the fringe that would contribute to its strength but also its vulnerability: its relationship to the mainstream, its collective ethic, and its experience of arts subsidy. Focusing on the period from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties (perhaps the first wave of the fringe), the chapter asks how far the movement succeeded, whether its radicalism was absorbed by the mainstream or quashed, what contributed to its arguable decline, and what is left today of its legacy of political engagement, artistic experimentation, and much more.

This chapter introduces important distinctions between intended and actual readership, and between the early novels, the ‘sophistic’ novels, and other known novels. It concludes that both the intended and actual readers of ‘sophistic’ novels were from the educated elite, and that Chariton probably envisaged such readers too, while perhaps writing in such as way that readers might also be found further down the social scale. Readers of this sort may also have been envisaged by Xenophon and some other writers of fiction, but in no case much further down.

Phrenology mediated everyday moments in Aotearoa New Zealand. It became associated with the spiritual leadership and healing practised by Māori tohungas and featured in the tactics of a stage performer during a tense diplomatic exchange in Te Rohe Pōtae (the King Country) in 1878. Meanwhile, for members of the colonial government and its administrators – both Māori and Pākehā – phrenology became a symbol of the irrational and anti-modern, a smear on the idea of progress at a time of debate over Māori survival. Phrenology’s critics were right to apprehend the authority that it garnered. As an appropriated European ’science’, it became one among various practices and technologies that shaped evolving Māori cultures and polities. Although moments of phrenological encounter are pebbles in the broader terrain of Māori life during this period, they nevertheless illuminate the questions that Māori were forced to ask themselves when navigating an upturned world

Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

The first chapter provides an overview of the rise and popularity of entrepreneurship as a practice and as a scholarly field of research. It notes how entrepreneurship has been shown to contribute positively to economic development and that scholarship related to supporting entrepreneurs through building robust entrepreneurial ecosystems is on the rise. Entrepreneurial ecosystems can be defined as a community of entrepreneurs engaged in reciprocal social and economic exchanges in the context of intermediary organizations, other actors, and institutions. Such research has focused on theory refinement as well as the development of metrics and ‘playbooks’ for communities that want to foster entrepreneurship. While policymakers are increasingly support building successful entrepreneurial ecosystems in their cities and states through public funding, there continues to be a dearth of research that addresses the relevance of gender for understanding and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems. This chapter emphasizes the relevance and importance of a gender perspective for understanding how and why entrepreneurial ecosystems may not benefit female entrepreneurs in the same ways that they benefit male entrepreneurs. It provides insights into the ways a gender perspective can contribute to a new conceptual model of entrepreneurial ecosystems and eventually lead to effective policies for inclusive economic development.

By rejecting the two dominant teleologies that have traditionally shaped Caesar's story (his alleged lifelong pursuit of sole domination, the "inevitability" of the collapse of the Roman Republic), turning a skeptical eye toward Cicero's ideological assumptions which shape our conception of this period and the character of the Republic itself, and embracing the major revelation of the last several decades that the Roman People played an important participatory role in the political life of the Republic, it now becomes possible to construct a substantially new interpretation of the political impact of Julius Caesar.

Against a certain perception of him as a cerebral writer with sophisticated philosophical tastes, the focus of much of Borges’s life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the hoodlums/compadritos of Buenos Aires; pirates and gangsters; tangos; classical Hollywood movies, and so forth. Following his biography of dissolute poet, Evaristo Carriego, ’Man on Pink Corner’ features criminal low-lifes and is Borges’s first real story published in a book. The figure of the gaucho appears in certain canonical stories of the 1940s - ’The South’, for example. A poem from the early 1960s, ’The Tango’, indulges an urban nostalgia and is elegiac. Detective stories had an abiding appeal for Borges. And the cinema inspired him to collaborate on a number of screenplays, author reviews, and translate aspects of cinematic style into his fictions. Borges’s influence on filmmakers was profound and extensive.