Popular culture Books

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...

The Cultural Industries of India is the first book length study dedicated to Indian cultural and creative industries.The chapters offer a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the cultural and creative industries and the wider economic,...

This book looks back to the early days of new and social media, to examine the potential threat that such technologies and platforms posed to the mainstream corporate media's gatekeeping, and its ability to exploit, humiliate, and even violate famous...

Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual...

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the "southern outsider" in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020,...

Zombies, vampires and ghosts feature prominently in nearly all forms of entertainment in the 21st century, including popular fiction, film, comics, television and computer games. But these creatures have been vital to the entertainment industry since...

Superheroes are enjoying a cultural resurgence, dominating the box office and breaking out of specialty comics stores onto the shelves of mainstream retailers. A leading figure behind the superhero Renaissance is Grant Morrison, long-time architect of...

A war-torn country only 60 years ago, South Korea has since achieved prodigious growth and global integration, experiencing rapid industrialization and seeing its cultural exports gain international popularity. Because of this rapid transformation, an...

There are two ages in the history of television: before HBO and after HBO. Before the launch of Home Box Office in 1972, the industry had changed little since the birth of broadcast network television in the late 1940s. The arrival of the premium...

Among the world's myriad cultures and their associated calendars, the idea of a "New Year" is relative and hardly specifies a universal celebration or even a universal point in time. Ways of celebrating the New Year range from the observances of...

"Women stars in Hollywood were invariably in two categories," said director Otto Preminger. "One group was of women who were exploited by men, and the other, much smaller group was of women who survived by acting like men." Beginning with silent...

The 2011-2012 volume in the Cooperstown Symposium series is a collection of new scholarly essays that use baseball to examine topics whose import extends beyond the ballpark. The essays represent 16 of the leading presentations from the two most...

This history of literary Arabic describes the evolution of Arabic poetry and prose in the context of music, ritual performance, the arts and architecture. The thousands-of-years-old language is perhaps more highly developed and refined than any other...

This book details many aspects of Latin American culture as experienced by millions of people living in Central and South America. The author argues that despite early and considerable European influences on the region, indigenous Latin American...

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...

Das Buch ""Das Erste Garde-Regiment Zu Fuss (1854)"" von Graf Waldersee beschreibt die Geschichte und Entwicklung des ersten Garde-Regiments zu Fu����� in Preu�����en. Der Autor gibt einen detaillierten Einblick in die Gr�����ndung des Regiments im Jahr...

Most sociological work on football fandom has focused on the 'malestream', i.e. the experience of men, and it usually talks about socially 'deviant' behaviours, such as alcohol, fighting and general hooliganism. Yet there have always been female fans of...

Despite the fact that the Nintendo DS is one the most popular game systems of all time, theorists have largely ignored it. Here, Samuel Tobin argues that the reason for this is that the DS is literally and figuratively beneath notice and not just by game...

According to social commentators, masculinity is in crisis as a result of profound social transformation. This kind of public discussion of the behaviours of boys and men points to a presumed need for policy intervention to act as a corrective to the...

Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis. Their early and unexpected deaths propelled them to iconic status, as beacons for the values of individuality and authenticity. However, with each passing year, the images of the lead men become further removed fromtheir...

This edited collection examines the ways in which football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents, using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens for this analysis. Drawing from a wide range of...

What does consumption in the global south signify, and how are its complexities communicated in media discourses? This book looks at the media representation of consumer culture in Africa, China, Brazil and India through case studies ranging from...

New technologies may have transformed human societies, but not much has been written on how they are impacting people in Africa and other developing regions, in terms of how they use technology to enhance their socioeconomic conditions in everyday life...

Why do screen narratives remain so different in an age of convergence and globalisation that many think is blurring distinctions? This collection attempts to answer this question using examples drawn from a range of media, from Hollywood franchises to...

FINALIST in the Arts & Entertainment category in the 17th NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS.RAKUGO, the Japanese art of storytelling, evolved as a form of entertainment for ordinary people during the Edo period (1603-1867). Yet, owing to its...

This two-volume set collects the first two years of Kappa Sigma's official publication, The Caduceus. The magazine features articles, stories, and news items of interest to members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, as well as a wide range of other topics of...

Starring Tom Cruise examines how Tom Cruise's star image moves across genres and forms as a type of commercial product that offers viewers certain pleasures and expectations. Cruise reads as an action hero and romantic lead yet finds himself in...

by Yuri N. Maltsev formerly of the Institute of Economics, Academy of Sciences of the USSR The following study on the history of Soviet economic thought during the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 is much more...

A first edition of The Halloween Encyclopedia was published by McFarland in 2003 (Booklist: "a worthy addition to public and school libraries as well as the reference shelves of journalists and leaders of community events"); it was the first...

This work traces the history of the jukebox from its origins in the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison in the 1880s up to its relative modern obscurity. The jukebox's first twenty years were essentially experimental because of the low...

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...

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...

Illuminates the presence of the supernatural and Gothic elements of the Western on screen, examining this through key historic moments in Western film and its contemporary incarnations.This book considers the presence of the supernatural and Gothic...

How do you fall in love with a game that ends in a draw 20% of the time? A game in which goals happen on only 10% of all shots and shots happen on only 11% of all possessions?To truly love soccer, you need to love the moments between goals. Non-Goals...

This is a collection of essays I have written over the years that are only related by the underlying subject matter of stupidity and social decline. Most of the essays deal in some way with stupidity, whether to describe or evaluate these issues, or try...