Cultural and media studies Books

Baseball fans may know the story of the Brooklyn Dodgers, but they don't know the whole story. With a foreword by Branch Barrett Rickey (grandson of Branch Rickey), this book fills the void in Dodgers scholarship, exploring their impact on popular...

Jewish humor, with its rational skepticism and cutting social criticism, permeates American popular culture. Scholars of humor--from Sigmund Freud to Woody Allen--have studied the essence of the Jewish joke, at once a defense mechanism against a...

From 1955 to 1964, American television was awash in adult Westerns, as much as one quarter of all prime-time programming. During its six seasons (1957-1963), Have Gun-Will Travel was recognized as one of the best shows on television--politically the...

In the midst of the Great Depression, an elite group of New Yorkers lived seemingly unaffected by the economic calamity. They were writers, playwrights, journalists, artists, composers, singers, actors, adventurers and socialites. Newspaperman Maury...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report have attracted much interest in recent years from popular audiences as well as scholars in various disciplines. Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been named on Time magazine's list of the...

This work examines the unique and ever-changing relationship between politics and comedy through an analysis of several popular American television programs. Focusing on close readings of the work of Ernie Kovacs, Soupy Sales, and Andy Kaufman, as...

This book is an investigation of the 300 year old model of global journalism used by the Western news media. It argues that the framework of localization is fragile and unable to cope with the issues, events, agents and institutions of globalization...

When two human ova fail to fully separate during pregnancy, the result is conjoined twins. The twins may be connected by ligament, bone, or just flesh, and they often share organs, but what captures most people's interest is whether the twins share...

In 1873 Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell first advanced the idea that there might be electromagnetic waves that were similar to light waves, a startling concept to the scientists of his day. About 13 years later, German physicist Heinrich Hertz...

Is violence in American cinema a reflection of life? Or does life imitate the violence people see in cinema? One of the pressing questions in today's society is whether fictional portrayals of violence have social or psychological consequences...

Feature films function as a keeper of America's collective conscience--a repository of fears, guilt, and hopes. "Buddy films" about men of different races depict a world where a peaceful balance is possible and conflicts can be resolved. Since the...

What's weighing on Americans? Look to horror movies for your answer--they're one of the best measures of the American consciousness. From an early fascination with the Gothic, to the mutant horrors of the Atomic Age and alien enemies of the Cold War,...

It has been said that M*A*S*H was a show set in the 1950s which reflected the shifting values of the 1970s and early 1980s. Hawkeye Pierce, Radar O'Reilly, Trapper John McIntyre, Sherman Potter, Margaret (Hot Lips) Houlihan, B.J. Hunnicutt, Frank...

In October 1931, Dick Tracy made his debut on the pages of the Detroit Mirror. Since then America's most famous crime fighter has tangled with a variety of protagonists from locations as diverse as the inner city and outer space, all the time...

Madonna has long been accepted as a pop culture icon, but this text postulates a greater cultural importance by analyzing her as a postmodern myth. This work examines how Madonna methodically discovered and constructed herself (often rewriting her...

Professional wrestling revels in its exaggeration of masculinity. This hyper-masculinity is evident in the physical appearance of wrestlers, the sexuality-charged and violent moves used in and out of the ring, the role assigned to women and the...

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818, started a phenomeon that has survived the years and permeated many aspects of popular culture. It has spawned numerous films, television...

This is an authoritative presentation and discussion of the most basic thematic elements universally found in folklore and literature. The reference provides a detailed analysis of the most common archetypes or motifs found in the folklore of selected...

Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works...

Unthinking Eurocentrism, a seminal and award-winning work in postcolonial studies first published in 1994, explored Eurocentrism as an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constituted a broadly shared...

This 4th edition of Ratings Analysis describes and explains the current audience information system that supports economic exchange in both traditional and evolving electronic media markets. Responding to the major changes in electronic media...

The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender explores a broad span of issues, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches to talk about a diverse range of media audiences; media forms, including television, newspapers, radio, magazines, video...

Fifty Contemporary Film Directors examines the work of some of today's most popular and influential cinematic figures. It provides an accessible overview of each director's contribution to cinema, incorporating a discussion of their career, major works...

Journalism and Free Speech brings together for the first time an historical and theoretical exploration of journalism and its relationship with the idea of free speech. Though freedom of the press is widely regarded as an essential ingredient to...

This book employs Jungian and post-Jungian concepts of unconscious mental processes along with film semiotics, analysis of narrative devices and cinematic history; to explore the reworking of myth and fairytale in Burton's gothic fantasy world.

Gerard Goggin has produced an incisive and penetrating overview of the world according to mobiles. Covering sight, sound and status, plus a host of other issues, he provides a provocative analysis of how mobile communication gadgets come to play such a...

Media and Democracy addresses key topics and themes in relation to democratic theory, media and technology, comparative media studies, media and history, and the evolution of media research. For example:How does TV entertainment contribute to the...

This Reader brings together, for the first time, key writings about the nineteenth century, a key period in contemporary discussion of visual culture. Exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising the editors suggest that...

The first and only book of its kind, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader brings together key writings from experts and contributors in this newly-emerging field. The articles embrace a broad range of writing on culture, including TV, film, art,...

Ill Effects argues that the question of media influence needs to be debated by those with a clearer understanding of how audiences and media interact with one another.

Studying the art writing and critique of the three leading art writers of the latter twentieth century with focus on canonical modern artists, Harris brings us the first study of its kind to assess the development of modern art writing.

'A major event in the cultural history of the modern era ... beautifully written, rich in insights, and a pleasure to read. A most absorbing and illuminating work of scholarship.' - Roy Porter, The Wellcome Institute

This volume lays out the theoretical and methodological framework to introduce the concept of journalistic role performance, defined as the outcome of concrete newsroom decisions and the style of news reporting when considering different constraints that...

This innovative textbook applies basic dance history and theory to contemporary popular culture examples in order to examine our own ways of moving in - and through - culture.

This book argues that the examination of sports media within cultural and media studies is organized around more than just a shared topic: mediated sports.

This book examines cinematic practices in Bollywood as narratives that assist in shaping the imagination of the age, especially in contemporary India. It examines historical films released in India since the new millennium and analyses cinema as a...