The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Addressing how Dolly Parton’s Netflix anthology series uses transmedia storytelling to reimagine her earlier music, I argue that it revises narratives about country music history. As Parton reframes songs like “Jolene,” her work underscores how her gender performance challenges gender stereotypes in country music performance history. By turning songs into television stories, Parton adapts to recent trends in transmedia storytelling. Her autobiographical authenticity narratives make her especially well-suited to new media self-branding. As critics such as Nadine Hubbs, Francesca Royster, Diane Pecknold, Kris McCusker, and Jada Watson have argued, we must continue to account for more nuanced readings of gender in country music history, particularly as it intersects with race, class, and sexuality. I demonstrate how Parton’s series speaks to the variety of gender expression and gender critiques in a range of country performances. I also call for more discussion of transmedia storytelling, intertextuality, and affect studies in the field.

Wallace’s work exhibits a fascination with attention that is regulated and optimized through processes of self-administration, as well as an interest in how alertness and interest can be performed (I explored this in Contemporary Fictions of Attention, 2018). However, he also demonstrates a concern with forms of attention that do not just play out in the self-conscious practices of an isolated subject. Instead, his work also stages interactive moments of collective attention, such as the focus group in “Mister Squishy” or the game of Eschaton in Infinite Jest. This chapter will lay out a broader context for Wallace’s interest in attention, before going on to identify how Yves Citton’s notion of “attention ecology” might help to frame an argument about Wallace’s depictions of group attention.

As the central villain of Infinite Jest, entertainment is a persistent preoccupation in Wallace’s writing. He presents it as a locus of neoliberal power in ways that anticipated the development of tailored entertainment services well ahead of time. This chapter examines Wallace’s representation of entertainment, couching it particularly in its antagonistic relationship with attention and engagement, which his work elevated as cardinal virtues. This chapter situates Wallace’s vision of entertainment in a critical paradigm of entertainment as a form of individual and social control, and as the ultimate Jamesonian manifestation of late capitalist flattening, arguing that the anhedonia of Wallace’s characters is a direct result of the dominant forms and agendas of entertainment on display in his writing. The chapter also argues that the forms of entertainment in Wallace’s work invite and reflect the idea of absorption, which is characterized positively and negatively depending on its genesis. That is to say, the absorption of entertainment is contrasted with the absorption of boredom, and again with the absorption of attention, with widely diverse effects on the postmodern subject. Entertainment constitutes a seductive and deadening force that both unites and isolates the subjects of Wallace’s writing, the great threat to the contemporary self.

A life filled with learning is advisable. Tasks involving some degree of cognitive complexity is desirable, but there is no reason to believe that certain forms of learning are better than others. What is critical is that the activity needs to be consistent and persistent. Involvement of cognitive activity at work is important and jobs that involve high stress, passive participation, and lack of complexity are associated with higher levels of cognitive impairment in later life. There is also no reason to believe that mental activities must be limited to the early years of life. People are able to learn at all ages and participation in learning is valuable for the brain throughout life. The concept of diversity refers as well to learning and mental activities. It is good to learn new things! Participation in cognitive activities throughout the lifespan both at home and at work and avoiding multi-tasking can help build cognitive reserve capacity. Cognitive activities directly impair disease processes. Being cognitively active and paying attention to the world helps to protect the brain from free radicals and toxins. Cognitive activities also assists in the management of stress.

While rarely at the center of debates around censorship in the United States, horror narratives have been profoundly shaped by pressures to constrain their provocative and shocking nature. This chapter explores the history of censorship efforts by government agencies, media companies, and public organizations and the impact they have had on horror across all forms of media. Tracing these efforts across various media, including literature, comic books, motion pictures, radio, and television, this chapter details the various entities that have tried to constrain the horror genre and the ways horror has adapted to these changing conditions. Throughout this historical period, regulatory efforts have consistently sought to limit shocking imagery and as well as restrict the evocation of feelings of shock and horror. Examining this regulatory history gives insights into the dynamic and evolving public dialogue about the limits of social acceptance and how much transgression society can accept.

The tangled beginnings of the establishment of merchandising at the BBC are further developed in Chapter 7. The most troubling question for the corporation was how, in line with the organisation’s traditional public values and duties as expressed in its charter and broadcasting licence, it should respond to the exploitation of radio identities such as ‘Uncle Mac’, a persona linked to the radio star and BBC employee Derek McCulloch, that were, without authority, also being commercialised on everyday consumer goods by outsiders to the corporation. Internal dynamics at the BBC were further impacted by the development of commercial television and the unexpected success of television programmes such as Dr Who. As expectations shifted, rather than being criticised for commercialisation, it was the public corporation’s failure to pursue profit that became contentious. One outcome of this was the development of a new management unit separate from programming, the BBC Exploitation Department, later renamed as BBC Television Enterprises, which served as merchandising agent for third-party productions such as The Magic Roundabout and The Wombles. Both instances resulted in litigation.

Chapter 6 traces the rise of merchandising agencies as a distinct and independent profession in the United Kingdom. It focuses on the most influential independent agency of the period, Walter Tuckwell & Associates. A former Disney employee, Tuckwell fostered a network connecting and linking commercial and legal opportunities offered by television programmes and the emerging demand for child-related products. The chapter discusses the specific relationship between content creation and marketing that arose during the earliest days of television. This entails a discussion of Tuckwell’s role at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where objections to the development of merchandising inside the corporation were managed. Commercial television changed agendas, leading to stabilisation in contractual practices between broadcasters, licensing agencies and sectors such as the toy, publishing and food industries; all eager to capitalise on the new communication medium. By the late 1960s, children’s participation in commodification was a fully integrated component of intellectual property practice and an integral part of television culture, regardless of the character of the broadcast licence.

Learning vocabulary through listening is one type of learning through meaning-focused input. Learners need at least 95 per cent coverage of the running words (around 3,000 word families) in the informal spoken input in order to gain reasonable comprehension and to have reasonable success at guessing unknown vocabulary from context clues. A well-balanced listening and speaking course includes opportunities to learn through listening to monologues and interactive communication, opportunities to learn from speaking and interacting with others, the deliberate study of pronunciation, vocabulary and multiword units, and grammar, and opportunities to become fluent in listening and speaking. This chapter includes a large range of activities to provide these opportunities, and describes how teachers can design speaking activities so that vocabulary is more likely to be learned. The research shows that those who observe speaking activities are just as likely to learn the vocabulary in the activities as those who actively participate

Perhaps more than any other single context, technology is the concept most frequently associated with DeLillo's fiction. Over the five decades since DeLillo published his first novel, technological innovations have played an increasingly prominent role in establishing the pace and rhythm of life in the Western world, and DeLillo's fiction reflects that, including concomitant ambivalences toward technology and technological change.

This chapter examines Britten’s recording and television activities in the 1950s and 1960s and considers how they track the rise of — and the anxiety surrounding — recording technology in mid-century British musical life. In particular, this chapter explores his collaboration with John Culshaw, who served as the producer for Britten’s Decca records and operas on BBC television. I argue that he and Britten sought to tap into elements of the live performance to fashion new musical experiences via technology. To illustrate this point, I focus primarily on their audio recording of the War Requiem, as well as three operas put on BBC television: The Burning Fiery Furnace, Peter Grimes, and Owen Wingrave. Ultimately, I show that, instead of treating technological reproduction as a substitute for live performance, Culshaw and Britten saw the relationship between technology and live performance as a symbiotic one, each helping to reinforce the other.

From mid-1943 until late-1950, Eric Crozier was an essential asset to Britten’s industry. His work alongside director and radio producer Tyrone Guthrie not only introduced Crozier to the Old Vic in London, but to the BBC as well, where Guthrie also worked. Joan Cross invited Crozier and Guthrie to each direct two different productions at Sadler’s Wells in 1943. Crozier directed and produced Britten’s first two operas, Peter Grimes in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells, and The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 for the short-lived Glyndebourne English Opera Company. Crozier wrote the librettos for Albert Herring and the children’s entertainment Let’s Make an Opera (with its central opera, The Little Sweep), in addition to writing the text for the cantata Saint Nicolas, and with E. M. Forster, he was co-librettist for Billy Budd. Britten, Crozier, and designer John Piper founded the English Opera Group. The endeavour was based on ‘the Britten–Crozier doctrine’ that sought the group’s own autonomy and ultimately a home to produce such works. That home was largely realised in the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in 1948, for which Crozier was a founder and co-artistic director.

This essay analyses how material formations of class are related to its symbolic trappings and why such an analysis may be currently relevant. Ecocriticism’s tendency to avoid work-based class analysis may be an effect of petroculture, whose flowing, accommodating logic reduces analysis to critique and reduces intervention to consumer choices. This essay argues that a confrontation between work, class, environmentalism, and narrative could be accomplished via the genre of the ‘boom narrative’. Boom narratives deal with signs of class stratification as well as the labour involved in resource extraction. Those based on actual events, such as the natural gas boom in North Dakota, travel widely, into journalistic and documentary coverage, and this coverage draws on and sometimes subverts boom narrative conventions. Television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Dallas, helped instal petrocultural logic. An understanding of boom narratives’ appeal, and how their conventions get deployed, critiqued, and subverted intervenes in the flow of petrologic. Such intervention would require keeping work the focus of class, and keeping material effects of class the focus of narrative analysis. Intervention may also require more ecumenical approaches to genre, and rethinking scholarly modes of critique.