In a recent Empire article, film critic Terri White takes issue with complaints that Cooper's A Star Is Born is sexist, arguing that the film is an indictment, rather than a
romanticisation, of awful male behaviour.
Cinema, television and the music industry plays a big role in the glorification and
romanticisation of depression and the medication attached with it.
His book brings forth the intricate interplay between civilisational history of the Pakhtun and the lands they inhabit, British colonial view and treatment of the Pakhtun and their various tribes, the
romanticisation of a rugged warrior and the demonisation of a semi-civilised alien in the Western mind, the Soviet and the American invasions, and the rise of the Taliban with the undercurrents of Pakhtun nationalism.
The chapters are set out in chronological order, dealing with texts which demonstrate how Anglophone writers have dealt with their Gaelic subjects in a variety of ways, including civilising missions, assimilation,
Romanticisation, stereotyping and, perhaps most discomforting for readers with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight, biologistic racial typologising.
They became the highlanders whose falsified clan history, from the
romanticisation of the highlands in the 18th century, has overtaken the whole of Scotland and given all modern Scots tartan plaid kilts which they never had historically.
The British tendency to brush colonial history under the carpet has been compounded by the gauzy
romanticisation of Empire in assorted television soap operas that provide a rose-tinted view of the colonial era, glossing over the atrocities, exploitation, plunder and racism that were integral to the imperial enterprise.
Beside the simile 'her green eyes glared, like the eyes of a slightly absentminded leopard', Gwen has written 'Simone is romanticised!' (39) For Gwen to note that Simone is romanticised, it follows that there has to be another version of Simone; 'romanticised' suggests a process of '
romanticisation' (for want of a less awkward term).
As researchers (and interviewees) indicate, the Ozark stereotype was paradoxical; it was simultaneous nostalgic
romanticisation of an agrarian past and disparagement of the non-capitalistic (lazy), non-materialistic (barefoot and ragged), non-modern (backwards and poor), non-Northern (bushwacker, Confederate) lifeway of the traditional Ozarker (Blevins 2002, Brandon and Davidson 2005).
This, together with the common
romanticisation of love marriages, is actually more suggestive of the modern European ideal of the 'bourgeois companionate marriage' (Mackie, p52).
This
romanticisation of sovereignty has led, as previously discussed, to fantasies that continue to extol the contemporary importance of sovereigns.
This is not to say that literature should be a facsimile of reality; nevertheless, literature does reflect and perpetuate social attitudes, and such Western
romanticisation and reductionism can function to enforce damaging imperialistic conceptions (Said).