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Introduction: Ovid's Fasti presents many challenges to the reader: its subject matter, the festivals and anniversaries of the Roman year, is less immediately accessible than much of Ovid's poetry; and unlike his earlier works, where familiarity with the literary context provides plenty of material for literary criticism, the Fasti is in constant dialogue not just with literature but also with the fabric of Rome – its myths and monuments, its rituals and politics. As such, the Fasti more than many texts requires an awareness of its social, historical and religious context to be fully appreciated.

"The rise of a curatorial culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a seismic shift for the traditional television industry. Television on Demand examines how we have reached this present moment, and considers the viable future of this crucial culture industry. Today's viewers their own viewing schedules, wait to watch entire seasons in marathon viewing sessions and stream shows to their mobile devices. Since the beginning of broadcasting, radio and television producers have pushed their shows to audiences in controlled environments that end in a discrete and quantifiable site to be transformed into advertising rates. While audiences clamor for more story-driven and scripted entertainment, their new viewing habits undermine the dominant economic structures that fund quality episodic series. This leads to an empowered audience that realizes its means of control of how it consumes media, as well as a new way of looking at the industry we have traditionally and currently call 'television.' "--

Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction offers new arguments about the origins of detective fiction in the United States, tracing the lineage of the genre back to unexpected texts and uncovering how authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher made use of the genre's puzzle-elements to explore the shifting dynamics of race and labor in America.

The author constructs an interracial genealogy of detective fiction to create a nuanced picture of the ways that black and white authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction's puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working-class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction.