Popular culture Books

This book discusses the use of authorship discourses and author figures in the promotion and marketing of media content, dealing with the U.S. mainstream media, including franchise film, network television, and triple-A video games. The research takes a...

Creating Reality in Factual Television analyzes the uneasy interaction between economics, culture, and professional ethics in reality and documentary television storytelling. Through the "frankenbite," an editorial tool that extracts and re-orders the...

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an...

This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries - in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and...

During the nineteenth century, gridding, graphing, and surveying proliferated as never before as nations and empires expanded into hitherto "unknown" territories. Though nominally geared toward justifying territorial claims and collecting scientific...

Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares is a savvy look at the wide range of adaptations, spin-offs, and citations of Shakespeare's plays in 1990s popular culture. What does it say about our culture when Shakespearean references turn up in television episodes of The...

This book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the frequently conspiratorial speculations that arise whenever people die in cars. Looking at fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile through...

Famous for both her cleavage-baring tops and her tough-as-nails approach to life and love on MTV's hit show "Jersey Shore," JWOWW tells it like it is. And now she's laying down the rules she has learned and lived by on smushing, smackdowns, and standing...

This work concentrates on tracing the evolution of the so-called "red menace" phenomenon as a means of demonstrating the correlation between growing American paranoia and the success of the anticommunist campaign (1935-1955). The House Committee on...

This book is an ethnographic investigation of punk subculture as well as a treatise on the importance of place: a location with both physical form and cultural meaning. Rather than examining punk as a "sound" or a "style" as many previous works have...

First published in 1990, Border Dialogues explores some of the territories of contemporary culture, philosophy and criticism. It touches on arguments surrounding Nietzsche and Italian 'weak thought', the mysteries of being 'British', and with more...

First Published in 1989, this work is based around a monthly TV column which Raymond Williams wrote for The Listener between 1968 and 1972. Those were the years of the Prague Spring, of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, of fighting in Cambodia and...

How did we get from Hollywood to YouTube? What makes Wikipedia so different from a traditional encyclopedia? Has blogging dismantled journalism as we know it? Our media landscape has undergone a seismic shift as digital technology has...

First published in 1982, The Sociology of Art considers all forms of the arts, whether visual arts, literature, film, theatre or music from Bach to the Beatles. The last book to be completed by Arnold Hauser before his death in 1978, it is a total...

Emmy-Award winning writer and comedian Gondelman's collection of personal stories of best intentions and mixed results is full of the warm and relatable humor that's made him a favorite on the comedy club circuit.

Between work, play, family, and friends, most of us feel like we're speeding along at 100 miles an hour. Our lives are full, yet we don't feel fulfilled. One solution is to slam on the brakes and adopt a radically simpler lifestyle. But, as psychologist...

In Clublife, Rob takes readers on a harrowing tour of the seedy, dangerous, and often deranged world of New York's hottest nightclubs. In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and The Tender Bar, Clublife is a remarkable memoir of the nightclub business...

Originally published in 1970, this book represents a unique study of beliefs and ritual practices in a pagan religion, and of the processes by which a transformation to Christianity took place.Christianity came to the major islands of Polynesia nearly...

The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and...

The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese civilization and the formation of culture in China until the present day. This book analyzes social aspirations and cultural practices in China from 1550 to 1999, showing how the notion of gentility has evolved...

Sexing the Groove discusses these issues and many more, bringing together leading music and cultural theorists to explore the relationships between popular music, gender and sexuality. The contributors, who include Mavis Beayton, Stella Bruzzi, Sara...

This second book in the Routledge Docalogue series continues to model a new form for the discussion of documentary film, focusing on a new film and a different set of critical questions.Kedi (2016) is the first feature documentary by Turkish-American...

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

These essays critically rethink Marxism in the light of the disintegration of communist regimes Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Containing essays from a group of internationally distinguished writers and intellectuals, this collection addresses...

The growing field of popular culture studies in Taiwan can be divided into two distinct academic trends; a different analytical framework is used to examine either locally oriented popular culture or transnational pop culture. This volume combine these...

This book examines American popular culture to demonstrate that celebrities have superseded religious figures as moral authorities. As trust in religious institutions has waned over recent decades, the once frivolous entertainment fringe has become the...

Written by nationally recognized anthropologists Conrad Kottak and Lara Descartes, this ethnography of largely white, middle class families in a town in the midwest explores the role that the media play in influencing how those families cope with...

Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment-or "militainment"-in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but...

Racing Cyberculture explores new media art that challenges the 'race-blind' myth of cyberspace. The particular cultural workers whose productions are addressed are the performance and installation artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the UK...

Everyday eBay is the first scholarly analysis of the internet marketplace that has become a global social, cultural and economic phenomenon. The eighteen new and classic essays gathered here examine eBay from a wide variety of perspectives as a...

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City, Hae explores how nightlife in New York City, long associated with various subcultures of social dancing, has been recently transformed as the city has undergone the gentrification of its space...

Young people in London have contributed to the production of a distinctively British rap culture. This book moves beyond accounts of Hip-Hop's marginality and shows, with an examination of the production, dissemination and use of rap in London, how this...

In this book, Nathanson examines how contemporary American television and associated digital media depict women's everyday lives as homemakers, career women, and mothers. Her focus on American popular culture from the 1990s through the present reveals...