Interrogating Popular Culture: Key Questions offers an accessible introduction to the study of popular culture, both historical and contemporary. Beginning from the assumption that cultural systems are dynamic, contradictory, and hard to pin down, Stacy Takacs explores the field through a survey of important questions, addressing:

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• Definitions: "What is popular culture? How has it developed over time? What functions does it serve?

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• Method" What is a proper object of study? How should we analyze and interpret popular texts and practices?

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• Influence: " How does popular culture relate to social power and control?

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• Identity and disposition: " How do we relate to popular culture? How does it move and connect us?

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• Environment" How does popular culture shape the ways we think, feel and act in the world?

Illustrated with a wide variety of case studies, covering everything from medieval spectacle to reality TV, sports fandom and Youtube, "Interrogating Popular Culture" gives students a theoretically rich analytical toolkit for understanding the complex relationship between popular culture, identity and society.

A timely and critical investigation into the way media operates in a so-called global age, presenting new empirical data on key sites of news production and crucially tying these findings to ongoing debates on globalization and democracy.

Beginning with an exposition of the four most widely argued theories of the press, this book goes on to explore several critical perspectives on the tasks and roles of print and broadcast news media in the United States. The author sets out critical analyses of several hotly debated issues, including news balance and objectivity, freedom of the press, and news coverage of minorities. After an appraisal of the present condition of journalism education in the United States, the author provides both complete and annotated professional guidelines and mission statements from key advertising, broadcasting, and print media organizations.

Consuming Television is a textbook designed to introduce students to the role of television in contemporary society and to encourage an understanding of what contemporary audiences are all about. Although the central focus of the book is on audiences, the coverage is extended to offer a unique examination of the actual programmes themselves. In addition, the production process - including the policies which affect television production - is explored. Clearly written and supported by unique and interesting data, including the most recent findings about the future prospects of both terrestrial and satellite/ cable broadcasts, cultural studies and the sociology of culture.

This book analyzes mobile gaming in the Asian context and looks into a hitherto neglected focus of inquiry - a localized mobile landscape, with particular reference to young Asians' engagement with mobile gaming. This edition focuses not only on the remarkable success of local mobile games, but also on the significance of social milieu in the development of Asian mobile technologies and gaming culture. It analyzes the growth of the current mobile technologies and mobile gaming not as separate but as continuous developments in tandem with the digital economy. It is of interest to both academics and a broader readership from the business, government, and information technology sectors

Shakespeare in mass media–particularly film, video, and television–is arguably the fastest growing research agenda in Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare after Mass Media provides both students and scholars with the most comprehensive resource available on the market for studying the extraordinary afterlife of Shakespeare’s plays in a wide range of media. From marketing to electronic Shakespeares, comics to romance novels, Star Trek to Kenneth Branagh, radio and popular music to Bartlett’s Quotations, the contributors explore the contemporary cultural significance of Shakespeare with theoretical sophistication and accessible writing.

While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.

This book explores a sensational crime and trial that took place in Rome in the late 1870s, when the bloody killing of a war hero triggered a national spectacle. A young southern wife's murder of her impotent soldier husband exploded into the first great "media circus" in the new nation of Italy. The trial of the widow and her acrobat lover shocked the young nation not only with its gruesome details, but also because masses of women flocked to the court, took sides and heatedly reacted to testimony, as a new generation of newspapers exploited the scandal to enchant an untapped readership. Largely ignored by historians, the Fadda Affair, as it was called, crucially shaped the young nation's self-image, but it still resists reduction to historiographical formula, even as its raucous messiness presages the postmodern centrality of performance and the displacement of substance by sensation.

What opportunities do digital technologies present? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching yet further social justice? Written by two experts in the field, this accessible book is the first to look at scholarly practice in the digital era and consider how it can connect academics, journalists and activists in ways that foster transformation on issues of social justice. The terra firma of scholarly practice is changing. This book offers both a road map and a vision of what being a scholar can be when reimagined in the digital era to enliven the public good, as it discusses digital innovations in higher education as well as reflecting upon what these mean in an age of austerity. It is ideal for students and academics working in any field of humanities or social sciences with a social justice focus.

American journalism is collapsing as newspapers and magazines fail and scores of reporters are laid off across the country. Conventional wisdom says the Internet is to blame, but veteran journalists and media critics Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols disagree. The crisis of American journalism predates the Great Recession and digital media boom. What we are witnessing now is the end of the commercial news model and the opportune moment for the creation of a new system of independent journalism, one subsidized by the public and capable of safeguarding our democracy.

This volume captures the essence of how we communicate differences in relationships, between and across cultures, in organizations, through education and in moments of local and global conflict and crisis that demonstrates the importance and viability of approaching peace and conflict communication from various fields within communication studies.

Throughout American history, women have worked in reform organizations, informal community groups, and consciousness-raising societies to change their neighborhoods, their states, and their nation. To accomplish social change, women have needed to communicate effectively among themselves and with society as a whole. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, women created numerous periodicals to address social, political, and economic issues. Many of these were short-lived newsletters, while others continue to be published today. Through entries on more than 70 individual periodicals published in the 19th and 20th centuries, this reference traces the history of women's involvement in many of the social, political, and economic issues in the United States. From abolitionism to temperance, from moral reform to birth control, from suffragism to anti-suffragism, from pacifism to feminism, this reference surveys a wide range of social movements. Entries are arranged alphabetically and each is written by an expert contributor. Each entry overviews the history of the periodical and provides circulation and related information. The entries close with selected bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a chronology and a general bibliography.

With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as their attention - and that of the media -- turned to yet another regional crisis. While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the Iban adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television. In less than four decades, Iban longhouses ('villages under one roof') have become media organizations shaped by the official ideology of Malaysia, a country hastily formed in 1963 by conjoining four disparate territories.

John Postill is a Research Fellow at the University of Bremen. He is currently studying e-government and ethnicity in Malaysia. Trained as an anthropologist at University College London, he has published a range of articles on the anthropology of media, with special reference to Malaysian Borneo.

This edited collection examines the changing faces of political communication in contemporary democracy. Based on comparative investigations of recent trends in the Netherlands and Great Britain, the essays provide fresh insights and new empirical evidence into the public representation of media-centred politics.

Crossroads in New Media, Identity and Law is a compilation of essays on the nexus of new information and communication technologies, cultural identity, law and politics. The essays provoke timely discussions on how these different spheres affect each other and co-evolve in our increasingly hyper-connected and globalized world.

"Recommended on all levels, particularly for those libraries with southern collections and journalism holdings." Choice

News Networks in Early Modern Europe attempts to redraw the history of European news communication in the 16th and 17th centuries. News is defined partly by movement and circulation, yet histories of news have been written overwhelmingly within national contexts. This volume of essays explores the notion that early modern European news, in all its manifestations - manuscript, print, and oral - is fundamentally transnational. These 37 essays investigate the language, infrastructure, and circulation of news across Europe. They range from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, focussing on the mechanisms of transmission, the organisation of networks, the spread of forms and modes of news communication, and the effects of their translation into new locales and languages.

In Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games author Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. Regardless of its historical significance however, this revolution has become less well-known-and appears less often on screen-than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history. Despite Hollywood's near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist-from directors in Haiti, the US, France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made. In addition to studying cinema, this book also breaks ground in examining video games, a pop-culture form long neglected by historians. Sepinwall scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin's Creed series that have reached millions more players than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the revolution, Slave Revolt on Screen calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.

This book explores, from a sociological perspective, the relationship between acting as symbolic work and the commercialization of popular culture. Particular attention is paid to the social conditions that gave rise to stardom in the theatre and cinema, and how shifts in the marketing of stars have impacted upon contemporary celebrity culture.

In Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants, Janet Janzen traces the motif of the "dynamic plant" through film and literature in early 20th century German culture. Often discussed solely as symbols or metaphors of the human experience, plants become here the primary focus and their role in literature and film is extended beyond their symbolic function. Plants have been (and still are) seen as closer to static objects than to living, moving beings. Making use of examples from film and literature, Janet Janzen demonstrates a shift in the perception of plants-as-objects to plants-as-living-beings that can be attributed to new technology and also to the return of Romantic and Vitalistic discourses on nature.

This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars themselves, and devotes several chapters to the principal subjects if the swashbucklers - pirates, highwaymen, cavaliers and knights. The result is to recall, however fleetingly, the golden days of the silver screen. Reviews of the original edition: 'An intelligent, scholarly, well-written account of adventure films, this work is sensitive both to cinema history and to the literary origins of the "swashbuckler"....Essential for any library with books on film, it may very well be the definitive book on its subject.' - Library Journal

A historian's view of the relationship between American history and the American film industry, this book is a witty and perceptive account of Hollywood and its films in the years from the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe to the end of the war in Korea, It describes how film makers and their industry were shaped by and responded to the strong political and social stimuli of wartime America. The author examines the recurring question of whether the movies were a reflection of the society in which they were produced, or whether by virtue of their undeniable propaganda power the films shaped that society. Combining evidence from literary, visual and oral sources, he covers a wide range of movies, emphasising in particular Casablanca, Mrs Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and Since You Went Away. In addition to placing the films in a social and political context, the author shows that Hollywood is a perfect example of the bone-headed way in which people behave when they are dealing with large amounts of money and power. Enjoyably nostalgic, this book will appeal to film enthusiasts as well as those interested in war and its effect on society.

Originally published in 1964, this book tells the history of the British cinematograph industry for the first time. It describes moments of splendid triumph and others of shattering failure. The mood switches from reckless optimism to demoralising pessimism, from years in which British films won the highest international awards to those when they were dismissed with scorn. It recalls a score of productions still ranked among the world's best, and the stars whose reputation was established in them. Attention is focused on the directors, those who kept to the fore during two and three decades and those with only one major success to their name. Behind them the men are identified who strove, often to their considerable financial loss, to gain a worthy place for British films in the world's markets.

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 technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies.