"[Slide's] blockbuster effort fills a gap in this area and is essential for all libraries supporting popular culture or film studies." Library Journal

This collection addresses the significant cultural phenomenon of the 'zombie renaissance' - the growing importance of zombie texts and zombie cultural practices in popular culture. The chapters examine zombie culture across a range of media and practices including films games, music, social media, literature and fandom.

In the course of the twentieth century glamour was associated primarily with cinema, although the theatre, fashion, high society, popular music, glossy magazines and department stores have all sought to harness its allure. It is usually associated with 'magic' and suggests a capacity to dazzle and seduce. Yet glamour's origins and meanings have never until now been thoroughly examined. For many, it is simply the aura of excitement and mystery that has surrounded the famous and the desirable from time immemorial. By contrast, this innovative book traces the origins of glamour to the nineteenth century and identifies it as a core feature of consumer culture. The authors examine the way that a language of visual seduction has been associated with a variety of social milieux and used to arouse envy and interest, mainly in commercial settings. They also illustrate eight distinct permutations of glamour, each of which has a complex history and is in continual evolution.

Campaign Communication and Political Marketing is a comprehensive, internationalist study of the modern political campaign. It indexes and explains their integral components, strategies, and tactics. * Offers comparative analyses of campaigns from country to country * Covers topics such as advertising strategy, demography, the effect of campaign finance regulation on funding, and more * Draws on a variety of international case studies including the campaigns of Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy * Analyses the impact of digital media and 24/7 news cycle on campaign conduct

While television today is taken for granted, Americans in the 1950s faced the challenge of negotiating the new medium's place in the home and in American culture in general. Protestant leaders--both mainstream and evangelical--began to think carefully about what television meant for their communities and its potential impact on their work. Using the American Protestant experience of the introduction of television, Rosenthal illustrates the importance of the interplay between a new medium and its users in an engaging book suitable for general readers and students alike.

The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household's public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V's first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor's approach to publicity. This book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty's new media image. It argues that the monarchy's deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War. Crucially, The Family Firm also contends that the royal household's media strategy after 1936 helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was severely shaken by the abdication of King Edward VIII.

The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household's public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V's first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor's approach to publicity. This book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty's new media image. It argues that the monarchy's deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War. Crucially, The Family Firm also contends that the royal household's media strategy after 1936 helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was severely shaken by the abdication of King Edward VIII.

In this exciting new work, David Boucher and Gary Browning explore Bob Dylan's radical and changing engagement with the "political." The contributions deal with various aspects and periods of Dylan's career, including the early protest ballads, the artistic high-point of his mid-sixties electric period in which his songs question the very notion of ordered collective politics, and present alternative disturbing images of a counter-reality. Finally the book explores the more personal and religious songs on issues of identity, alienation and ethical striving. Whereas in the early protest songs the diagnosis and prognosis did not always give rise to answers, the later religious analyses of the world gone wrong appeared to generate a very clear and simple remedy in Jesus.

This collection critically examines twenty-first century representations of ageing, focusing on various media images and discourses as well as individuals' own experiences and self-presentations of ageing, drawing on innovative new empirical data.

The 'serial killer' has become increasingly prevalent in popular culture since the term was coined by Robert Ressler at the FBI in the mid-1970s. Murders and Acquisitions explores the social and political implications of this cultural figure. The collection argues that the often blood-chilling representations of the serial killer and serial killing offered in TV series, films, novels and fan productions function to address contemporary concerns and preoccupations. Focusing on well-known popular culture texts, such as The Wire, Kiss the Girls, Monster, the Saw series, American Psycho, The Strangers, CSI and Dexter, this eclectic anthology engages with a broad spectrum of cultural theory and performs critical textual analysis to examine the sophisticated ways the serial killer is deployed to mediate and/or work through cultural anxieties and fears.

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) challenge what players understand as "real." Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay is the first collection to explore and define the possibilities of ARGs. Though prominent examples have existed for more than two decades, only recently have ARGs come to the prominence as a unique and highly visible digital game genre. Adopting many of the same strategies as online video games, ARGs blur the distinction between real and fictional. With ARGs continuing to be an important and blurred space between digital and physical gameplay, this volume offers clear analysis of game design, implementation, and ramifications for game studies. Divided into three distinct sections, the contributions include first hand accounts by leading ARG creators, scholarly analysis of the meaning behind ARGs, and explorations of how ARGs are extending digital tools for analysis. By balancing the voices of designers, players, and researchers, this collection highlights how the Alternate Reality Game genre is transforming the ways we play and interact today.

Spaces of Communication offers a concise introduction to semiopragmatics and condenses the intellectual trajectory of one of the foundational figures of film studies into a relatively short and accessible volume. It testifies to the author's deep and rich intellectual engagement with a vast array of objects ranging from the classics of the cinephile canon to television news programs, home movies and mobile phone films.

Much is known about the media's role in conflict, but far less is known about the media's role in peace. Graham Spencer's study addresses this deficiency by providing a comparative analysis of reporting conflicts from around the world and examining media receptiveness to the development of peace. This book establishes an argument for the need to rethink journalistic responsibility in relation to peace and interrogates the consequences of news coverage that emphasizes conflict over peace.

More than 100 general magazines with circulation over 100,000, some still publishing and many memories from earlier this century, are described in two- or three-page profiles. . . . A chronology placing the periodicals on a time line provides an interesting, at-a-glance look at magazines' history. Most of the important magazines are included, except for some sports and women's magazines slated for future companion collections. "Library Journals"

This volume provides concise, in-depth histories of 106 of the most significant mass-market or general magazines in the United states--both active periodicals and those which have ceased publication. Included are magazines such as "Life," Colliers, "Playboy," "People," "Saturday Evening Post," and "Family Circle," as well as major tabloids, Sunday supplement magazines, regional magazines, and the most widely read publications devoted to specific audiences--"Modern Maturity," "Yankee," "Mechanix Illustrated," "American Farmer," and so on. Although the emphasis of the volume is the modern mass-market periodical, thirty-three titles have been included that either existed in their entirety in the nineteenth century or were established then. Generally, magazines with wide audience appeal and a circulation of over 100,000 were selected for inclusion. Taken together, these profiles offer the most comprehensive picture of American general interest magazine publishing available to date.

The profiles are arranged alphabetically by magazine title and see references have been included in the case of title variations. In many instances, the history included here is the only source of information on the magazine covered. In other cases, large amounts of material that have been written over the years on a title have been consolidated and the history and accompanying bibliography provided here will serve as the definitive source on the magazine in question. Locations have been provided in cases that might prove problematic. An indispensable source for journalism students and researchers, this volume belongs on the reference shelves of every academic and large public library.

This anthology collects key texts on women in culture and offers an ideal introduction, for students in women's studies and feminism, to the cultural dimensions of women's experience today. The materials are drawn from a wide range of sources, including popular newspapers, women's and fashion magazines, academic journals, and textbooks. Together they reveal how the mass media, music, and pornography industries portray women, how advertising promotes unattainable standards of beauty for women, and how, for example, cultural expectations can promote date rape and sexual harassment. Women's contributions to culture are also explored.

Divided into three parts - The Cultural Construction of Gender, Cultural Institutions Defining Women; Opportunities for Women in Culture - the anthology offers ten chapters and a total of thirty-one readings, supported by detailed introductions, questions, suggested activities and bibliographies of key works (including films and videos) for further study.

The readings selected are by: Maya Angelou, Ellen Bass, John Berger, Carl Bohmer, Kim Chernin, Farai Chideya, Johnnetta B. Cole, Patricia Hill Collins, Terry Kay Diggs, Marilyn Friedman, Marilyn Frye, Gay and Lesbian Speakers' Bureau, Miranda Van Gelder, Shirley Glubka, bell hooks, Indiana University Empowerment Workshop, Douglas Kellner, Jean Kilbourne, Ynestra King, Audre Lorde, Martha Mahoney, Papusa Molina, Sherry B. Ortner, Andrea Parrot, Elayne Rapping, Linda M. Scott, Susan Sherwin, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Starhawk, Shari L. Thurer, Sojourner Truth, and Naomi Wolf.

After 9/11, there was an increase in both the incidence of hate crimes and government policies that targeted Arabs and Muslims and the proliferation of sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. Arabs and Muslims in the Media examines this paradox and investigates the increase of sympathetic images of "the enemy" during the War on Terror.

Evelyn Alsultany explains that a new standard in racial and cultural representations emerged out of the multicultural movement of the 1990s that involves balancing a negative representation with a positive one, what she refers to as "simplified complex representations." This has meant that if the storyline of a TV drama or film represents an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the storyline also includes a "positive" representation of an Arab, Muslim, Arab American, or Muslim American to offset the potential stereotype. Analyzing how TV dramas such as West Wing, The Practice, 24, Threat Matrix, The Agency, Navy NCIS, and Sleeper Cell, news-reporting, and non-profit advertising have represented Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans during the War on Terror, this book demonstrates how more diverse representations do not in themselves solve the problem of racial stereotyping and how even seemingly positive images can produce meanings that can justify exclusion and inequality.

Southern rhetoric is communication's oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what would southern rhetorical critique be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came? Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott.

This volume provides an important update to our current understanding of politics and the internet in a variety of new contexts, both geographically and institutionally. The subject of e-democracy has morphed over the years from speculative and optimistic accounts of a future heightened direct citizen involvement in political decision-making and an increasingly withered state apparatus, to more prosaic investigations of party and governmental website content and micro level analyses of voters' online activities. Rather than levelling the communications and participation playing field, most studies concluded that existing patterns of bias and power distribution were being repeated online, with the one exception of a genuine change in the potential for protest and e-activism. Across all of these accounts, the question remains whether the internet is a levelling communication tool that elevates the profile of marginalised players in the political system, or whether it is a medium that simply reinforces existing power and participatory biases. While employing case studies from various global perspectives, this book investigates the role of digital media and competitive advantage, campaigns and the effect of social media, online communication as way of fomenting nonviolent revolutions and the undeniable and important role of the internet on democracy around the world.

This is the first sustained comparative examination of the importance of media attention on the provision of economic assistance, suggesting that the news media is an important medium for policy makers to gauge potential domestic political pressures and thus the need to be responsive and even anticipatory in addressing problems real or perceived. Particular attention is paid to the responsiveness of bureaucracies, long held to among the most insulated institutions of government. Cross-national in scope, this book looks at the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Japan, facilitating a nuanced understanding of the interaction of international and domestic politics as mediated by the media.

In the modern world of networked digital media, authors must navigate many challenges. Most pressingly, the illegal downloading and streaming of copyright material on the internet deprives authors of royalties, and in some cases it has discouraged creativity or terminated careers. Exploring technology's impact on the status and idea of authorship in today's world, The Near-Death of the Author reveals the many obstacles facing contemporary authors. John Potts details how the online culture of remix and creative reuse operates in a post-authorship mode, with little regard for individual authorship. The book explores how developments in algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) have yielded novels, newspaper articles, musical works, films, and paintings without the need of human authors or artists. It also examines how these AI achievements have provoked questions regarding the authorship of new works, such as Does the author need to be human? And, more alarmingly, Is there even a need for human authors? Providing suggestions on how contemporary authors can endure in the world of data, the book ultimately concludes that network culture has provoked the near-death, but not the death, of the author.

Religion and the Social Order

Electric Dreams turns to the past to trace the cultural history of computers. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to define the meanings of these powerful machines over more than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage's "difference engine" in the nineteenth century to contemporary struggles over file swapping, open source software, and the future of online journalism. To reveal the hopes and fears inspired by computers, Electric Dreams examines a wide range of texts, including films, advertisements, novels, magazines, computer games, blogs, and even operating systems.

Electric Dreams argues that the debates over computers are critically important because they are how Americans talk about the future. In a society that in so many ways has given up on imagining anything better than multinational capitalism, cyberculture offers room to dream of different kinds of tomorrow.

Violence and Understanding in Gaza is the first comprehensive investigation of the British broadsheets' coverage of the Gaza War. Written in accessible language and engaging style, it critiques the newspapers' output, which it is argued replicates the black and white logic of war instead of focusing on negotiations and peace.

This is an important study of the publishing of contemporary writing in Britain. It analyzes the changing social, economic and cultural environment of the publishing industry in the 1990s-2000s, and investigates its impact on genre, authorship and reading. It includes case studies of Trainspotting and the His Dark Materials trilogy.