Popular culture Books

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic...

Focusing on Disney's production of Shanghai Disneyland, this book examines how the Chinese state and the local market influence Disney's ownership and production of the identities and the representations of Shanghai Disneyland. Qualitative methods are...

In the West, Islam and Muslim life have been imagined as existing in an opposing state to popular culture-a frozen faith unable to engage with the dynamic way popular culture shifts over time, its followers reduced to tropes of terrorism and enemies of...

This volume brings together twenty original essays on the changes and continuities in gender relations and intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location. The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid...

Know what academic freedom is? Or what it's come to mean? What's affirmative about affirmative action these days? Think you're up on the problem of sexual harassment on campus? Or know how much the university depends on part-time faculty? Academic...

Since nearly the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, activists have signaled the inadequacy of prevention strategies and drug protocols that have been developed from research done primarily on men. The latest C.D.C. figures prove they were right; for the...

PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy addresses the very issue of political correctness and the current skirmishes in the culture wars. It includes statements from many of our leading contemporary public intellectuals, including Joan Wallach...

Shopping Around investigates the issues of contemporary popular narrative, feminine pleasure, and consumer culture, viewing the permutations of the feminine subject as a textual construction evolved through everyday life. A wide spectrum of texts are...

Rock and roll music evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, as a combination of African American blues, country, pop, and gospel music produced a new musical genre. Even as it captured the ears of the nation, rock and roll was...

This is Barthes' seminal text reimagined in a contemporary context by contemporary academics. Through a revisiting of Mythologies, a key text in cultural and media studies, this volume explores the value these disciplines can add to an understanding of...

The image of surfing is everywhere in American popular culture - films, novels, television shows, magazines, newspaper articles, music, and especially advertisements. In this book, Kristin Lawler examines the surfer, one of the most significant and...

In Mobility, Space and Culture, Peter Merriman draws upon theoretical and empirical work from across the social sciences and humanities to provide a critical evaluation of the relationship between 'mobility' and 'place'/'site', reformulating places as in...

Films about education provide many of the most popular interpretations of what teaching and learning mean in schools. An analysis of this medium reveals much about the historical, cultural, political, and philosophical dimensions of education. Timely and...

This book looks at social representations of romantic love as portrayed in films and interpreted by their audiences, using cinema as a means for analysing the state of romantic love today, and the touchpoints and disconnects between its representation on...

This volume represents the current state of research on picture books and other adjacent hybrid forms of　visual/verbal texts such as comics, graphic novels, and book apps, with a particular focus on texts produced for and　about young people. When Perry...

Traditionally gnawa musicians in Morocco played for all-night ceremonies where communities gathered to invite spirits to heal mental, physical, and social ills untreatable by other means. Now gnawa music can be heard on the streets of Marrakech, at...

'TV Nation' enjoyed a brief but memorable tenure on NBC, and now, with the publication of "Adventures In TV Nation," those who bemoan Michael Moore's absence from the airwaves can revisit the show "TV Guide" called "as compelling and provocative as it is...

Counterfactual thinking has become an established method to evaluate decisions in a range of disciplines, including history, psychology and literature. Elke Reinhuber argues it also has valuable applications in the fine arts and popular media. A...

This book showcases contemporary US set design by engaging designers with one another, pairing dialogue and imagery from varied experiences and practices. Within these pages, we witness an expansion of traditional theatrical set design, evolving fluidly...

This book critically examines the larger world of astrology in India, its ubiquity and relationship with religion, caste, gender, class and aspirations.It looks at astrology through an empirical and phenomenological lens, analyzing different...

A field guide to the new American Roots movement, United States of Americana is a vivid, fascinating, and comprehensive survey of how and why young urban Americans are finding inspiration in the cultural traditions of an earlier time in many areas of...

What is emo? For starters it's a form of melodic, confessional, or EMOtional punk rock. But emo is more than a genre of music-it's the defining counterculture movement of the '00s. EVERYBODY HURTS is a reference book for emo, tracing its angsty roots all...

No matter what your station in society, everybody has to go sometime. Even the wealthy, powerful, and world-renowned must ultimately meet their Maker--though some have departed this life more ignobly than they might have wished. From Mozart to rock and...

To die, kick the bucket, to meet your Maker, dead as a doornail, get whacked, smoked, bite the dust, sleep with the fishes, go six feet under--whatever death is called, it's going to happen. In 1789 Ben Franklin wrote, "In this world nothing is certain...

The number one New York Times bestselling author of Bias delivers another bombshell--this time aimed at . . .100 People Who Are Screwing Up AmericaNo preaching. No pontificating. Just some uncommon sense about the things that have made this country...

Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to...

Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairy tale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers' experience. Within...

"Bisexuality is about three centuries overdue . . . nevertheless, here it is: a learned, witty study of how our curious culture has managed to get everything wrong about sex."-Gore Vidal

This intriguing book engages with the concept of the body in its cultural context by acknowledging and demonstrating that the human body is understood differently in Western and Indian cultures. The contributors go on to show that any attempt to put...

This book discusses the rich and varied culture of China's online society, and its impact on offline China.  It argues that the internet in China is a separate 'space' in which individuals and institutions emerge and interact. While offline and...

This book examines different aspects of Asian popular culture, including films, TV, music, comedy, folklore, cultural icons, the Internet and theme parks. It raises important questions such as - What are the implications of popularity of Asian popular...

This book presents a comprehensive, full-length analysis of the uses of media and communication technologies by different social actors in Malaysia. Unlike other studies of the media in Malaysia which concentrate on "political economy" or "freedom of the...

This book examines the influence of mobile media technology on the lives of young people in East and North Asia, South East Asia and Australia. It discusses the impact information communication technologies have today on social identity, well-being,...

Beads, Bodies, and Trash merges cultural sociology with a commodity chain analysis by following Mardi Gras beads to their origins. Beginning with Bourbon Street of New Orleans, this book moves to the grim factories in the tax-free economic zone of rural...

In social theory and sociology, time and travel in technological cultures is one of the new and challenging research topics in the 'mobilities turn'. Yet surprisingly, contemporary practices of mobility have till now, seen only limited theorization...

Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics sets out to examine the role of feelings and mood in the production of social and cultural experience. By returning to the work of Raymond Williams, and informed by recent 'affect theory', it...

In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds takes the reader on a guided tour of this end-of-the-millenium phenomenon, telling the story of rave culture and techno music as an insider who has dosed up and blissed out. A celebration of rave's quest for the...

The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante's vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante's global reception and...

This book observes and analyzes transnational interactions of East Asian pop culture and current cultural practices, comparing them to the production and consumption of Western popular culture and providing a theoretical discussion regarding the specific...

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals and fans of the band. It brings together international researchers to assess, evaluate and reformulate approaches to...

Celebrity culture has a pervasive presence in our everyday lives - perhaps more so than ever before. It shapes not simply the production and consumption of media content but also the social values through which we experience the world. This collection...

This intriguing issue represents the truly international and interdisciplinary nature of contemporary work in cultural studies.

Papers featured in this issue offer an in-depth examination of the interaction of ethnicity, identity, and 'multiculturalism' with contemporary culture.