SOUTHEAST ASIAN MEDIA STUDIES JOURNAL 

SPECIAL ISSUE 4.2:

DIGITAL MEDIA CULTURE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN SOCIETIES 

In the world of teen drama (or YA drama, as some prefer), there are a number of ways to represent adolescence and its attendant horrors, and we’ve seen a great deal of fantasy-based approaches; beginning with Buffy, some establish that high school is actual hell. But few series come close to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s devotion to that idea. The Netflix series (2018-20), based on the Archie Comics spin-off and featuring a much darker version of Sabrina Spellman, may be difficult for audiences to reconcile with ABC’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the previous adaptation. While one is a teen sitcom in which Sabrina’s powers get her into wacky situations, and she is supported by a talking Salem the cat, the other might feel closer to The Craft.

For decades, eighteenth-century periodicals have been readily available in countless digital databases--Google Books, the Burney Newspapers Collection, Adam Matthews Eighteenth-Century Journals, Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Collections Online, --simultaneously, feminist literary scholars have been recovering previously ignored eighteenth-century women writers. While scholarly journals and as a result, classrooms, have included more women writers into the literary canon, the critical bias of novels and poetry over periodicals, fiction over nonfiction, remains.

René Pintard in his fundamental study Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié
du XVIIe siècle already highlighted the difficulty in distinguishing between the
illustration of a sincere fideism and that of a strategic fideism, expressed in order to
disguise otherwise risky affirmations. The authors that Pintard defines as “erudite
libertines” of the seventeenth century, a period when, like everyone else, even
atheists and sceptics died “well confessed and having received Holy Communion”,
were masters of hypocrisy by necessity. The same also went for the thought of the
following century, the century of Reason and the Enlightenment, in which freedom of