Popular culture Books

The inside story of the U.S.-Chinese superpower conflict playing out behind the scenes of today's movie industry, from the leading media scholar. China surpassed North America to become the world 's largest movie market in 2020. Formerly the focus of...

"Ghost of the Hardy Boys is an elegant book, full of charm and pathos and whimsy. The writing is restrained, the characterizations deep and rich, the humor nuanced." -Washington PostAs millions of boys and girls devoured the early adventures of the Hardy...

An elegantly designed box of 50 postcards featuring stunning paintings by Gustav Klimt, one of the world's most popular artists.Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter, and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. He is...

While the topic of queer sexuality in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union has been investigated for decades by scholars working in the fields of sociology, history, literary studies, and musicology, it has yet to be studied in any comprehensive or...

Engaging Cultural Ideologies offers a recontextualization of the effects of Poland's cultural practices, especially those concerning issues such as nationalism, elitism, and race, on the genesis and performance of contemporary Polish compositions from...

A beneficiary of the pioneering incorporation of sound and synchronicity into cinema, the Hollywood musical became the most popular film genre in America's thirties and forties. Its eastward migration resulted in a barrage of Polish screen musicals that...

In this study, Goska exposes one stereotype of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. In the "Bieganski" stereotype, Poles exhibit the qualities of animals. They are strong, stupid, violent, fertile, anarchic, dirty, and especially hateful in a way that more...

There was never such a thing as true freedom of speech. In the past, in order to speak freely you had to have access to a printing press, a newspaper, a radio or a TV station. Until now. The age of blogging has begun. The internet revolution has given us...

This book introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demography in Western art musics and demonstrates their historical and sociological importance. The essays in this book explore the concepts of "existential irony" and...

"Frederik L. Schodt has at long last unveiled the fascinating story of 'Professor Risley.' Circus scholars, history buffs, and anyone with an ounce of curiosity should be grateful to him."-Dominique Jando, Circopedia.org"Professor" Risley (Richard Risley...

Graffiti crews are willing to risk anything for their art. Called vandals, criminals, even creative terrorists, graffiti artists set out to make their voices heard and alter the way people view the world. But when one crew finishes the biggest graffiti...

Named Library Journal Best Fiction in Translation 2013."Cocaine is a brilliant black comedy that belongs on the same shelf as Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion. Pitigrilli is an acidic aphorist and a wicked observer of...

From the very beginning, filmmakers have struggled to free themselves from censorship and manipulation by special-interest groups, and this struggle is clearly evident in the history of drug films. Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness is an exhaustive...

What's the right faith for those who clamor for spirituality, but strain at the confines of organized religion? Discordia - described as a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion - may be the answer. Starting from the "firm belief that it is...

Offering an overview of the marketplace for comic images between 1820 and 1850, this book makes a case for the interest and importance of a largely neglected area of visual culture. It considers the impact on the development of print culture of the...

This book traces the steady decline in Irish Catholicism from the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 up to the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in that diocese in 2011. The young people awaiting the Pope's address in Galway were entertained by two...

This unique and innovative text provides undergraduate students with tools to think sociologically through the lens of everyday life. Normative social organization and taken for granted beliefs and actions are exposed as key mechanisms of power and...

Many people believe that everyone who uses heroin is addicted. In fact, this is true of only about 20 percent of heroin users. By clearing up common misconceptions like these, this book provides information that can save the lives of people using the...

No understanding of the history of the sixties could be complete without a grasp of the work of Leary, Alpert, and Metzner, the cultural resistance to their experiments, and the way in which psychoactive drug use became a part of contemporary society...

Paul Madonna's popular comic, "All Over Coffee" had been running for twelve years in the San Francisco Chronicle when he was evicted from his longtime home and studio in the Mission District, ground-zero in the "tech wars" transforming...

We have entered the age of "peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security, and even humanity. Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter,...

Inspired by the pre-Hispanic codices that escaped immolation during colonial invasions, this artists' book opens out in accordion folds expanding to a length of over 21 feet. Rice has created a series of beautiful and jarring montages in which the...

This book traces the heightened time-consciousness that has emerged since the 1990s in popular Indian discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture and argues that these anxieties concerning time are symptomatic of the struggle between...

With characteristic intelligence, wit, and feminist insight, Ellen Willis addresses democracy as she sees it: "a commitment to individual freedom and egalitarian self-government in every area of social, economic, and cultural life." Moving between...

From the New Yorker's inimitable first pop music critic comes this pioneering collection of essays by a conscientious writer whose political realm is both radical and rational, and whose prime preoccupations are with rock 'n' roll, sexuality, and above...

In her research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, Nhi T. Lieu explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in...

In American Piets, Ruby C. Tapia reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes's suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida,...

This book is a hands-on study skills guide that explores how film and moving image can be used as sources. It is aimed at those who want to use film and moving image as the basis for research and offers advice on research methods, theory and methodology,...

This is the first book to study the cultural impact of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. It contains 14 new essays from scholars working in literature, music, art history and military history. The Armistice brought hopes for a better future, as well as...

The Independent Group is now the subject of global scholarly interest, and this book, a sequel to The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945-59, explores the Anglo-American phenomenon from a new perspective. The Group included...

First book to bring together the wide range of violent entertainments that characterised popular culture in nineteenth-century London and seriously assesses their origins, functions and impact. Draws upon the methodologies of social and cultural history...

This is the first book to focus on James Bond's relationship to the playboy ideal through the sixties and beyond. Examining aspects of the Bond phenomenon and the playboy lifestyle, it considers how ideas of gender and consumption were manipulated to...

This book examines the relationship between class and culture in 1930s Britain. Focusing on the reading and cinema-going tastes of the working classes, Robert James' landmark study combines rigorous historical analysis with a close textual reading of...

This groundbreaking book is about what 'popular culture' means in France, and how the term's shifting meanings have been negotiated and contested. It represents the first theoretically informed study of the way that popular culture is lived, imagined,...

Drawing on an eclectic range of primary and secondary sources Chaplin examines the development of darts in the context of English society in the early twentieth century.He reveals how darts was transformed during the interwar years to become one of the...

This book looks at how rap and metal, the two most pervasive popular music forms of the 1990s, have been highly engaged with America's role in the world, supercapitalism and their own role within it. This has especially been the case when genres -...

Considers how notions of Britishness were constructed and promoted through architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature. Maps important moments in the self-conscious evolution of the idea of 'nation' against a broad cultural historical...

This re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history covers a variety of genres, such as B-movies, war films, women's pictures and theatrical adaptations, as well as social issues which...

Bringing Modernity Home offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a new phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post Second World War period. It traces the change to consumer-led design after a time of...

Eugenio Barba is one of the world 's leading theatre artists and theorists working across cultures. This work examines three major strands of Barba's work; his research at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, his use of performance as a...

Offering a critical reappraisal of a prolific and popular genre, this text also brings new material into the broader field of television studies. Sarah Cardwell surveys the traditional discourses about adaptation, unearthing the unspoken assumptions and...

Investigating areas as diverse as travel literature, fiction, dialect, the stage, radio, and television, feature film, music and sport, this fascinating book assesses the attitudes and portrayal of the North of England within the national culture and how...

This work examines the Hollywood "British" film - ie American features that were set in Britain, based on British history or literature and included the work of British producers, directors, writers and actors. "British" films include many of most...

Brings together chapters on the bestseller, detective fiction, popular romance, science fiction and horror. The text combines an accessible account of the cultural theories that have informed the study of popular fiction, with detailed readings of Jackie...

Building the ordinary into the extraordinary brick by brick.This first official book for Adult Fans of LEGO takes the reader on a visually stunning journey from the very earliest hollow bricks to the complex shapes and building techniques of today.LEGO...

In 1978, an obscure animated TV show produced by an upstart Toronto firm caught the eye of the world's hottest filmmaker, George Lucas.He was looking for someone to produce an animated short for a CBS Star Wars television special. The ensuing...

Sexual politics in revolutionary England recounts a dramatic transformation in English sexual polemic that unfolded during the kingdom's mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. In early Stuart England, explicit sexual language was largely confined to...