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Mark Antony And Popular Culture

Decent Essays

Mark Antony and Popular Culture: Masculinity and the Construction of an Icon by Rachael Kelly, is a pathbreaking analysis of how Antony (the pop culture icon, hopeless lover and drunkard) differs so substantially from Antonius (the historical figure, esteemed general and statesman). Kelly successfully lays out—with great quality and depth—how the mythology itself performs a deeper socio-cultural function. In order to further examine and engage with this idea, this informative and original study employs a socio-ideological analysis of a series of seven culturally resonating screen texts dating from, for example, Cleopatra (Cecil B DeMille, 1934) to the television series Rome (HBO, BBC, RAI, RAI2, 2005-2007). This meticulously …show more content…

These screen narratives are dire in positioning the Antony-icon as a paradigm of gender anxiety. The eight texts analyzed in this study each follow a series of narrative tropes that in some way relate to gender performance. Kelly catechizes the notion that Antony-as-icon is used to perform and purge the spectre of masculinity gone awry. For readers unfamiliar with Marcus Antonious of whom Antony’s deficiencies are manifested, chapter one clearly delivers a historiography and ideology of Antonius as well as background information on Roman masculinity as a representational strategy and Roman political invective. Utilizing discursive practice, Kelly offers a possible explanation for why Mark Antony is often considered a figure of problematic masculine performance in the pre-cinematics era socio cultural receptions of this mythology. Once a basis for …show more content…

Other important texts that were not examined such as silent films, comedies, animation, and pornography—all of which have told the story of Mark Antony in some way or another at some point—were purposefully neglected. Due to Kelly’s analysis only considering those films that follow the genre conventions of the historical epic, meaningful information about hegemonic masculinity as it is encoded within these genres is neglected and it does not help that often times, discourses in a historical epic are embedded within Western gender and identity construction and therefore go unseen to audiences. However, this exemplar book still greatly contributes to the fields of gender, history and media by taking gender studies to a new direction by probing the purpose and boundaries of hegemonic masculinity within Western cultural and political discourse. Students, scholars and fans of Mark Antony and gender will learn greatly from this monograph and in which the Antonian mythography has been translated into the complex semiological system that is

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