This Special Collection delves into how stereotypes are visually represented across digital, non-digital, and pre-digital cultures, focusing on their societal impact. Drawing on the methodologies of Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, the analysis emphasizes how stereotypes function as a 'mirror in a mirror', reflecting and reshaping cultural narratives. Visual imagery, particularly humorous depictions of national and ethnic stereotypes, challenges conventional views by transcending moral and social constraints. Effective humour must resonate with diverse audiences by being both relatable and understandable.
The Internet has reshaped humour by democratizing its creation, blurring professional boundaries, and broadening social norms. Online content has fragmented audiences, pushing creators to innovate and adapt to niche communities. The rise of visual culture has redefined testimony and information sharing, with digital images and memes influencing public opinion and shaping political discourse. Memetic communication and 'Imagefare' are critical tools for understanding these dynamics.
Authors are encouraged to explore stereotypes in visual humour, such as cartoons and memes, using interdisciplinary approaches. These studies reveal how humour can serve political agendas or diminish stereotypes' societal impact by exposing their influence. This issue appeals to humour specialists and social sciences, art, and humanities scholars, fostering interdisciplinary insights into visual and cultural studies.
Image: Kondas, Paul. Ü.R! (1960). Oil on canvas, 118 × 80 cm. Reproduced by kind permission of the owner, Viljandi Museum, and the Kondas Centre.
Editors: Guillem Castañar-Rubio (Guest Editor), Orest Semotiuk (Guest Editor), Sergey Troitskiy (Guest Editor)
Visual Rhetorics of Humour: The Formation and Dissemination of Stereotypes through Cartoons and Memes
Special Collections
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Beyond Text: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Textuality
Visual Rhetorics of Humour: The Formation and Dissemination of Stereotypes through Cartoons and Memes
Diversity and Competition within the Latin Church: The Secular-Mendicant Controversy and its Long Aftermath (13th–20th Centuries)
Thinking the Political: Theory, Literature, Practice
Poetry Off the Page: Intersecting Practices and Traditions in British Poetry Performance
Humour as a Human Right
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: Opening Museum Collections, Project Data and Digital Images for Research, Query and Discovery
Literature as Imaginary Archive: Ephemera and Modern Literary Production
Caliban's Mirror: Reflections of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
Cultural Representations of Machine Vision
The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past
Medieval Minds and Matter
Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins
The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty
Production Archives 03: Archival Practices
Production Archives 02: Production Contexts
Production Archives 01: Puppets for Action
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine
Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age
Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture
Reading in Ruins: Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies
The Language of Perspective
Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain
The Working-Class Avant-Garde
Colonialities in Dispute: Discourses on Colonialism and Race in the Spanish State
Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018
Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
Muslims in the Media
Encounters between Asian and Western Art in the 20th and 21st centuries: a liberating influence for Asia?
Waste: Disposability, Decay, and Depletion
Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation
New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records
Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives
Representing Climate: Local to Global
Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics
Freedom After Neoliberalism
The Medieval Brain
Remaking Collections
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Imaginaries of the Future 02: Politics, Poetics, Place
Imaginaries of the Future 03: Utopia at the Border
Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing
#Agreement20
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century
New Voices in Jewish-American Literature
Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives
From TV To Film
American Literature & the Transnational Marketplace
Mnemosyne
Healing Gods, Heroes and Rituals in the Graeco-Roman World
The Abolition of the University