Cultural studies Books

Food isn't just what we eat, it connects us to our family, our community and the world around us.We live in a challenging time in history, facing unprecedented global crises, and yet, local food initiatives by small farmers, community workers, and...

This collection intervenes into the debates surrounding feminism's contentious relationship with domesticity in popular culture. The contributors touch on topics ranging from reality television shows like How Clean is Your House? to the figure of...

This book examines the transformations in form, genre, and content of contemporary Chinese print media. It describes and analyses the role of post-reform social stratification in the media, focusing particularly on how the changing practices and...

Today's convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the popular universes across cinema, novels, the Web, and more...

Discussions of street culture exist in a variety of academic disciplines, yet a handbook that brings together the diversity of scholarship on this subject has yet to be produced. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture integrates and reviews current...

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology...

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday...

The study of fashion has exploded in recent decades, yet quite what this all means, quite where it might take us, is not clear. This new book helps to bring fashion into focus, with a comprehensive guide to the key theories, perspectives and developments...

From classic gothic literature like Frankenstein, to contemporary serial killers, horror film fanzines and low-budget movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this book collects twenty-nine key articles to examine the enduring resonance of horror...

Since the early 2000s, Disney Channel has been dominated by original live-action programming popular among tween girls. The shows' successes rely not only on their popularity among girl audiences, but also on the development of star personae by girl...

Hollywood's live-action superhero films currently dominate the worldwide box-office, with the characters enjoying more notoriety through their feature film and television depictions than they have ever before. This book argues that this immense...

Animals make for terrible technology. The technological use of animals--making food, drugs, clothing, and cosmetics out of animal material--will cease. A cow takes over one year to grow, "wastes" over ninety percent of what it's fed, and cannot be...

Over the last 20 years, ethnic minority groups have been increasingly featured in Japanese Films. However, the way these groups are presented has not been a subject of investigation. This study examines the representation of so-called Others -...

'British Studies' and 'British Cultural Studies' cover a wide range of facets of contemporary Britain. Studying British Cultures: An Introduction is a unique collection of essays which examine the most significant aspects of this quickly developing area...

Shakespeare, The Movie brings together an impressive line-up of contributors to consider how Shakespeare has been adapted on film, TV, and video, and explores the impact of this popularization on the canonical status of Shakespeare.Taking a fresh look at...

Soldier Heroes explores the imagining of masculinities within adventure stories. Drawing on literary theory, cultural materialism and Kleinian psychoanalysis, it analyses modern British adventure heroes as historical forms of masculinity originating in...

This Companion documents and celebrates artistic journeys within the framework of rich and complex cultural heritages and traditional dance practices of the Asia-Pacific region. It presents various dance forms from Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong,...

This edited collection explores how the relationship between comic art and feminism has been shaped by global, transnational, and local trends, curating analyses of multinational comic art that encompass themes of gender, sexuality, power, vulnerability,...

This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the 'godfather of cyberpunk', William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of 'gestalt' psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked...

From journalists Agnes Hooper Gottlieb and Henry Gottlieb, and Brent Bowers and Barbara Bowers, the acclaimed co-authors of 1,000 Years, 1,000 People, comes a new book that celebrates the reasons we're proud to call America home--from jazz and the...

Somewhere, somebody is having more fun than you are.Orso everyone believes. Peter Sagal, a mild-mannered, Harvard-educated radio host--the man who puts the second "l" in "vanilla"--decided to find out if it's true. From strip clubs to gambling halls to...

Black women have been balancing the competing demands of work and home since before women even won the right to vote. But black voices are barely acknowledged in the mainstream "mommy wars" dialogue. Lonnae O'Neal Parker is determined to change that, in...

An economic revolution is transforming America: the New Mainstream. In this groundbreaking book, Guy Garcia explains how Americans will eat, work, play, learn, and spend money in the twenty-first century--and why any organization that ignores the lessons...

Claudia Corvette. From her tousled bedroom hair to her name-all the porn stars in this world take their names from supermodels and sports cars-she is adult entertainment's prototypical femme fatale. Her life is the collision of countless...

David Shenk looks at the new face of our world with a curiosity and connection-making responsiveness that make him exhilarating to read. These are bits, takes, provisional sweeps at issues still coming into focus, but taken together they give us a...

The universal act of dressing-shared by both men and women, young and old, rich and poor, minority and majority-has shaped human interactions, communicated hopes and fears about the future, and embodied what it means to be Somali. Heather Marie Akou...

Throughout his career, Johnny Cash has been depicted-and has depicted himself-as a walking contradiction: social protestor and establishment patriot, drugged wildman and devout Christian crusader, rebel outlaw hillbilly thug and elder statesman. Leigh H...

In Goth's Dark Empire cultural historian Carol Siegel provides a fascinating look at Goth, a subculture among Western youth. It came to prominence with punk performers such as Marilyn Manson and was made infamous when it was linked (erroneously) to the...

In some cases, scientific research into the space-time continuum may have [unexpected] consequences... as occurs in Isaac Asimov's short story "'A Statue for Daddy.' In this tale... two scientists... recover 14 dinosaur eggs. The eggs are carefully...

What a great premise for an anthology! And it succeeds, both in its celebration of our crazy culture and its fascinating analysis, through the poems, of popular myths that have stood the test of time." -KliattIn the past few decades, poetry about and...

... a ground-breaking contribution to the field of African literature... " -Research in African LiteraturesAnyone with the slightest interest in West African cultures, performance or theatre should immediately rush out and buy this book." -Leeds African...

This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber's ground-breaking article, "Popular Arts in Africa", which stimulated new debates about African popular culture and its defining categories. Focusing on performances, audiences, social contexts...

Advertising is often portrayed negatively, as corrupting a mythically pure relationship between people and things. In Advertising Myths Anne Cronin argues that it is better understood as a 'matrix of transformation' that performs divisions in the social...

Women have been making art for centuries, yet their work has been seen as secondary or has gone unrecognised altogether. Women Making Art asks why this is so, and what it would take for us to realise the extent of women's extraordinary contribution to...

In this highly engaging book, Antony Easthope examines 'Englishness' as a form and a series of shared discourses. Discussing the subject of 'nation' - a growing area in literary and cultural studies - Easthope offers polemical arguments written in a...

This book examines the mediated shift in the contemporary human condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with media content in daily life, essentially transmediating ourselves into new forms and (re)creating ourselves across media.Across an...

Food matters, not only as a subject of study in its own right, but also as a medium for conveying critical messages about capitalism, the environment, and social inequality to diverse audiences. Recent scholarship on the subject draws from both a...

The very idea of 'public service' came under fierce attack in the Thatcherite 1980s. This book takes the two key services, broadcasting and the NHS, and traces the heated debates and political pressures which radically transformed them both. It points to...

This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own - in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what...

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the...

The first book-length work on the Parisienne, this study combines scholarship in the fields of art history, literature and fashion to enrich our understanding of this intriguing cinematic figure, simultaneously offering new perspectives on film.

Can fairy tales subvert consumerism? Can fantasy and children's literature counter the homogenizing influence of globalization? Can storytellers retain their authenticity in the age of consumerism? These are some of the critical questions raised by Jack...

Mobile Technologies charts the social, cultural, creative, and design aspects of mobiles as they are being incorporated into and changing the nature of media. It provides rigorous and timely analysis of the new area of mobile media and will be of...