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In 2005, twelve cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, igniting a political firestorm over demands by some Muslims that the claims of their religious faith take precedence over freedom of expression. Given the explosive reaction from Middle Eastern governments, Muslim clerics, and some Danish politicians, the stage was set for a backlash against Muslims in Denmark. But no such backlash occurred. This book shows how the majority of ordinary Danish citizens provided a solid wall of support for the rights of their country's growing Muslim minority, drawing a sharp distinction between Muslim immigrants and Islamic fundamentalists and supporting the civil rights of Muslim immigrants as fully as those of fellow Danes—for example, Christian fundamentalists. Building on randomized experiments conducted as part of large, nationally representative opinion surveys, the book also demonstrates how the moral covenant underpinning the welfare state simultaneously promotes equal treatment for some Muslim immigrants and opens the door to discrimination against others. Revealing the strength of Denmark's commitment to democratic values, the book underlines the challenges of inclusion but offers hope to those seeking to reconcile the secular values of liberal democracy and the religious faith of Muslim immigrants in Europe.

This book explores Gary Larson’s unlikely career as the creator of the groundbreaking, syndicated panel cartoon, The Far Side. To help contemporary readers understand the controversial qualities and cultural significance of Larson’s work, the author recreates the historical context in which The Far Side first emerged: the early 1980s when “family-friendly” mainstream mediums like the newspaper comics page were largely intolerant of alternative worldviews or irreverent brands of comedy. As a self-taught cartooning auteur with a morbid sense of humor and subversively scientific perspective on life, Larson resisted or bypassed most of the established rules about “appropriate” art and comedy on the Funnies Page. That independence allowed him to introduce a set of innovative aesthetic devices, comedic tones, and philosophical frames that challenged and delighted many readers, while upsetting and confusing others. In sum, this book reminds old fans and new readers of the ways that Larson’s iconoclastic work and career effectively broadened the culture’s palate for alternative comedy, profoundly shaping the worldviews and comedic sensibilities of a generation of cartoonists, comedy writers and every day readers.

A commitment to free speech is a fundamental precept of all liberal democracies. However, democracies differ significantly when addressing the permissibility of laws regulating certain kinds of speech, especially extreme speech. In the United States, for instance, the commitment to free speech has been held by the Supreme Court to protect the public expression of even the most noxious racist ideology. In contrast, in almost every other democracy governments enjoy considerable leeway to restrict racist and other types of extreme expression. What accounts for the marked differences in attitude towards the constitutionality of hate speech regulation? Does hate speech regulation violate the core free speech principle constitutive of democracy? Or do values such as the commitment to equality or individual dignity legitimately override the right to free speech in some circumstances? In attempting to answer these and other questions, this book focuses on highly topical issues such as homophobic speech, Holocaust denial, incitement to terrorism, veiling controversies, and the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. It includes interdisciplinary perspectives from law, philosophy, history, psychology, and literature, and provides comparative perspectives from experts in various countries including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, and Israel, as well as from the United States and the United Kingdom.

This volume covers modern and contemporary forms of humour in China's public and private spheres, including comic films and novels, cartooning, pop songs, internet jokes, and advertising and educational humour. The second of two multidisciplinary volumes on humour in Chinese life and letters, this text also explores the relationship between the political control and popular expression of humour, such as China and Japan's exchange of comic stereotypes. It advances the methodology of cross-cultural and psychological studies of humour and underlines the economic and personal significance of humour in modern times.

Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. His style popularized what has become known as the “clear line” in cartooning, but these thirteen scholars show how his life and art were actually very complicated. The book includes analyses of Hergé’s aesthetic techniques, including studies of his efforts to comprehend and represent absence and the rhythm of mundanity between panels of action. Broad views of his career explain how Hergé navigated changing ideas of air travel, and narrow readings of his life and work during Nazi occupation explain how the changing demands of the occupied press transformed his understanding of what comics could do. Other chapters explore the fraught lines between high and low art. By reading the late masterpieces of the Tintin series, these comics scholars from around the world attempt to answer a question Hergé himself never could: where his own legacy would fall between high art and low art. The book also reexamines Hergé’s place in the history of cartooning, considering how the clear line style has been reinterpreted around the world, from contemporary Francophone writers to a widely praised Chinese-American cartoonist and on to Turkey, where Tintin has been reinvented into something more specifically meaningful to an audience Hergé probably never anticipated. With authors from five continents drawing on a variety of critical methods, the chapters of The Comics of Hergé show how rich comics can become when the lines blur.

This book interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing conflicts of our times? Taking as its point of departure the question of whether critique belongs exclusively to forms of liberal democracy that define themselves in opposition to religion, the book considers the case of the “Danish cartoon controversy” of 2005. It offers accounts of reading, understanding, and critique for offering a way to rethink conventional oppositions between free speech and religious belief, judgment and violence, reason and prejudice, rationality and embodied life. The book, first published in 2009, has been updated for the present edition with a new Preface by the authors.

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque is a new literary and cultural history of the First World War in France. It offers readers a fresh perspective on wartime popular culture, uncovering the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lived through the war one hundred years ago. The book develops a counternarrative to postwar interpretations of the infantryman as passive victim or active resister, focusing instead on the mechanisms through which soldiers and civilians resigned themselves to the war but imagined themselves as survivors. They were able to do so by reactivating a form of storytelling-the picaresque-whose central concern had always been the survival of a nonheroic protagonist in a hostile and chaotic world. During the Great War, French novelists, journalists, graphic artists, and cultural critics drew both consciously and unconsciously upon the long and rich European picaresque tradition. With its spirit of self-preservation as opposed to self-sacrifice and its affirmation of the value of life over death, the picaresque was a literary and cultural mode uniquely appropriate for expressing and attenuating the anxieties provoked by modern, industrialized warfare. The French reinvented the picaro as an apt hero for the modern age and positioned the picaresque as the dominant ethos of the modern cultural imagination.

Asian Comics is the first book that covers the comics (comic books and magazines, humor/cartoon magazines, newspaper strips, graphic novels, and gag panels) of the continent − 16 countries in all. Broken into parts on East, Southeast, and South Asia, the book carefully surveys the history and contemporary status of comics, both from artistic and industrial perspectives and including main stream and alternative forms and points out trends, issues, and problems cartoonists face. Decades-long (more than 30 years) research was carried out through interviews with more than 400 comics-related individuals during about 60 trips to Asia for that purpose, observation in their studios/offices and homes, participation with cartoonists in many festivals, symposia, workshops, and lectures, and primary scrutiny of archives, government and other data. Interviewees included the fathers and an occasional mother of Asian comic art and the cream of the crop and some young cartoonists. The result is a structured blend of factual data, views of comics people, and fascinating anecdotes about how cartoonists broke in, their working habits and styles, and their contributions. Also interesting is the first chapter discussing the predecessors of contemporary Asian comic art in the form of paintings, sculptures, scrolls, and puppet drama that displayed caricature, wit and playfulness, satire, and sequential narrative. The book is enhanced by many illustrations and supported by a full bibliography and endnotes.

This volume challenges a traditional period divide of 1660, exploring continuities with the decades of civil war, the Republic and Restoration and shedding new light on religious, political and cultural conditions before and after the restoration of church and monarchy. The volume marks a significant development in transdisciplinary studies, including, as it does, chapters on political theory, religion, poetry, pamphlets, theatre, opera, portraiture, scientific experiment and philosophy. Chapters show how unresolved issues at national and local level, residual republicanism and religious dissent, were evident in many areas of Restoration life, and recorded in plots against the regime, memoirs, diaries, historical writing, pamphlets and poems. An active promotion of forgetting, the erasing of memories of the Republic and the reconstruction of the old order did not mend the political, religious and cultural divisions that had opened up during the civil wars. In examining such diverse genres as women’s writing, the prayer book, prophetic writings, the publications of the Royal Society, histories of the civil wars by Clarendon and Hobbes, the poetry and prose of Milton and Marvell, plays and opera, court portraiture and political cartoons the volume substantiates its central claim that the Restoration was conditioned by continuity and adaptation of linguistic and artistic discourses.