I briefly tackled irony in The Lord of the Rings in my last post, focussing on a quintessential speech by Bilbo Baggins at his birthday to make my point. The use of irony in popular texts is a rich vein, one that I first seriously delved into while researching and writing about The Simpsons in […]
I published a version of this post a couple of days ago. This one is much more detailed and refined. I wrote it up for The Drum, but it wasn’t wanted. You get it here instead 🙂 The Simpsons fan world is abuzz with the news Matt Groening has revealed the real Springfield is near […]
In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote of the ways nations are constructed – of the common symbols and artefacts that define peoples within national borders. Equally potent are the symbols used to define others within those borders, or to signify they are outsiders. It is the symbols used in The Simpsons to […]