Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O'Neill shows how celebrity culture authorizes audiences to evaluate public figures on personal terms and in so doing reallocates moral, intellectual, and affective authority and widens the public sphere. O'Neill examines how celebrity culture creates a context in which citizens regard one another as public figures while elevating individual public figures to an unprecedented personal fame. Although this new publicity fosters nationalism, it also imbues public life with personal feeling and transforms the public sphere into a site of divisive, emotionally intense debate. Further, O'Neill analyzes how celebrity culture's scrutiny of the lives and personalities of public figures collapses distinctions between the public and private spheres and, as a consequence, challenges assumptions about the self and personhood. Celebrity culture intensifies the complex emotions and debates surrounding already-fraught questions of national belonging and democratic participation even as, for some, it provides a means of redefining personhood and cultural identity. O'Neill offers a new critical approach within the growing scholarship on celebrity studies by exploring the relationship between the emergence of celebrity culture and civic discourse. Her careful readings unravel the complexities of a form of publicity that fosters both mass consumption and cultural criticism.

This book brings together an international group of scholars who chart and analyze the ways in which comic book history and new forms of graphic narrative have negotiated the aesthetic, social, political, economic, and cultural interactions that reach across national borders in an increasingly interconnected and globalizing world. Exploring the tendencies of graphic narratives - from popular comic book serials and graphic novels to manga - to cross national and cultural boundaries, Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives addresses a previously marginalized area in comics studies. By placing graphic narratives in the global flow of cultural production and reception, the book investigates controversial representations of transnational politics, examines transnational adaptations of superhero characters, and maps many of the translations and transformations that have come to shape contemporary comics culture on a global scale.

This brief but readable biography tells the story of the most recognized figure in baseball-Babe Ruth. Besides vividly describing the highlights of Ruth's career, author Wayne Stewart examines the unprecedented impact Ruth had on the nature and future of the game. Ruth's ability to hit the long ball and the flamboyance of his off-field persona infused the game with a new excitement that rescued baseball from the negative effects of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Making extensive use of interviews conducted by the author with members of Ruth's family and with players who knew Ruth, this biography is an engaging exploration of how Ruth helped shape modern baseball. Babe Ruth is the most recognized figure in baseball and a true American icon. In this brief but readable biography, author Wayne Stewart engagingly describes the highlights of Ruth's career and deftly examines the reasons for the unprecedented impact Ruth had on the game. Ruth's ability to hit the long ball and the flamboyance of his off-field persona infused the game with a new excitement that rescued baseball from the negative effects of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. The author draws new insights into Ruth's life and career through interviews he conducted with members of Ruth's family and with other baseball players who knew him. Readers are also provided with a quick reference chronology to Ruth's career, a bibliography of important print and non-print information resources on Ruth, a statistical appendix summarizing Ruth's on-field production by season, and a discussion of how Ruth has been depicted in books, movies, plays, and other media since his death. This biography will both explain and satisfy the continuing curiosity about Ruth among young basbeball fans who never had the opportunity to see him play.

While a number of recent works have linked magical realism to postcolonial trauma, this book expands the trauma-theory-based analysis of magical realism. Borrowing from the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, the study adapts his concept of chronotope to that of shock chronotope in order to describe unstable time-spaces marked by extreme events. Besides trauma theory, contemporary theories of representation formulated by Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj i ek, among others, corroborate specific literary analyses of magical realist novels by Caribbean, North American, and European authors. The study discusses a series of concepts, such as "spectacle" and "hyperreality," in order to create an analogy between the hyperreal, a spectacle without origins, and magical realism, a representation of events without a history, or a recreation of an absence that first needs to be acknowledged before it can be assigned any meaning. Magical realist hyperreality is meant to be a reconstruction of events that were "missed" in the first place because of their traumatic nature. While the magical realist hyperreal might not explain the unspeakable event, if only to avoid the risk of an amoral rationalization, it makes the ineffable be vicariously felt and re-experienced. This study establishes a somewhat unorthodox nexus between magical realist writing (viewed primarily as a postmodern literary phenomenon) and trauma (understood both as an individual and as an often invisible cultural dominant), and proposes the concept of "traumatic imagination" as an analytical tool to be applied to literary texts struggling to represent the unpresentable and to reconstruct extreme events whose forgetting has proven just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination defines the empathy-driven consciousness that enables authors and readers to act out and/or work through trauma by means of magical realist images. Corroborated by elements of trauma theory, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, and contemporary theories of representation, the work posits that the traumatic imagination is an essential part of the creative process that turns traumatic memories into narratives. Magical realism lends traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because the magical realist writing mode and the traumatized subject share the same ontological ground: being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling. Over more than half a century now, magical realism has demonstrated its versatility by affecting literary productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing different histories of violence. This book examines novels by traumatized and vicariously traumatized authors who make extensive use of fantastic/magical elements in order to represent slavery, postcolonialism, the Holocaust, and war. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction is an important book for magical realism- and trauma theory-based critical collections.

The prospect of dinner and a movie is always an enticing one. Whether it is a date early on in a relationship with all the apprehension and barely contained frisson that that entails or an opportunity for a child free evening and the chance to watch a full length film of your choice without having to keep your finger on the remote to pause for toilet breaks, the combination of food and cinema is a winning one. Food is inextricably linked to all aspects of our lives, food for feasts, food to comfort, food to harm and always food to raise the sexual tension. Cinematographers know this too. So often there are dishes in a movie that deserve a mention in the credits so pivotal are they to the storyline. You only have to mention "Silence of the Lambs" for fava beans and chianti spring into the conversation and apple pie is often off or suddenly back on the menu for anyone who has recently watched American Pie for the first time. Let us get one thing straight here the dishes celebrated in this book are not physically available at the pictures. Food served in containers too large to be used as airline carryon baggage is not what this book is about. The recipes here are for those movie moments that made you step away from the popcorn bucket. Who doesn't want to slice garlic with a razor blade to create the garlicky spaghetti sauce so lovingly made in Goodfellas or jump through the screen to nibble absolutely everything in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory (including Johnny Depp although that may be just my own fantasy) and every woman on this planet wants "what she's having" in When Harry met Sally! So this is your chance, if it was eaten on screen then the recipe for it may well be in this book. Unless of course you fancy making the chilled monkey brains from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which case I suggest you still buy the book but change your dessert plans. What about a nice Apple Strudel from the Sound of Music instead?

The popularization and cult-like following of electronic music has provoked new relations between men and machines, art and technology, and modern shamans and disc jockeys. New technologies and multimedia tools have awakened neo-ritual practices through the emergence of Psychedelic Trance parties, evoking tribal experiences inspired by a new shamanism, mediated by high-tech guide elements. Exploring Psychedelic Trance and Electronic Dance Music in Modern Culture investigates the expansive scope of Electronic Music Dance Culture (EMDC), the rise of Psychedelic Trance culture, and their relationship with new digital platforms. Drawing from perspectives in sociology, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics and the arts, religious studies, information technologies, multimedia communication, shamanism, and ritualism, this book analyzes the impact of new technologies on individual and collective behaviors in cyberspace. This innovative reference source is ideal for use by academicians, researchers, upper-level students, practitioners, and theorists. Focusing on a variety of topics relating to sub-cultures, human behavior, and popular culture, this title features timely research on alternative culture, electronic music festivals, ethnography, music and religion, psychedelic drugs, Psytrance, rave culture, and trance parties.

The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new style of man: the metrosexual. Overwhelmingly straight, white, and wealthy, these impeccably coiffed urban professionals spend big money on everything from facials to pedicures, all part of a multi-billion-dollar male grooming industry. Yet as this innovative study reveals, even as the industry encourages men to invest more in their appearance, it still relies on women to do much of the work. Styling Masculinity investigates how men's beauty salons have persuaded their clientele to regard them as masculine spaces. To answer this question, sociologist Kristen Barber goes inside Adonis and The Executive, two upscale men's salons in Southern California. Conducting detailed observations and extensive interviews with both customers and employees, she shows how female salon workers not only perform the physical labor of snipping, tweezing, waxing, and exfoliating, but also perform the emotional labor of pampering their clients and pumping up their masculine egos. Letting salon employees tell their own stories, Barber not only documents occasions when these workers are objectified and demeaned, but also explores how their jobs allow for creativity and confer a degree of professional dignity. In the process, she traces the vast network of economic and social relations that undergird the burgeoning male beauty industry.

During the first decade of this millennium Germany's largest ethnic minority-Turkish Germans-began to enjoy a new cultural prominence in German literature, film, television and theater. While controversies around forced marriage and "honor" killings have driven popular interest in the situation of Turkish-German women, popular culture has played a key role in diversifying portrayals of women and men of Turkish heritage. This book documents the significance of marriage in 21st-century Turkish-German culture, unpacking its implications not only for the cultural portrayals of those of Turkish background, but also for understandings of German identity. It sheds light on the interactions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in contemporary Germany. This book explores four notions of marriage in popular culture: forced marriage; romantic marriage; intercultural marriage; and gay marriage. Over five chapters, the book shows that in popular culture marriage is conventionally portrayed as little more than a form of oppression for Turkish-German women and gay men. The state of Turkish matrimony is seen as characterized by coercion, lack of choice, familial duty and "honor," even violence. In German culture, by contrast, marriage stands for individual choice, love and equality. However, within comedy genres such as "chick lit", "ethno-sitcom" and wedding film, there have been attempts to challenge the monolithic power of these gender stereotypes. This study finds that, in grappling with the legacy of these stereotypes, these genres reveal a yearning within German popular culture for the very kinds of "traditional" gender roles Turkish Germans are imagined to inhabit. The book provides a comprehensive account of the multiple ways in which the diverse portrayals of marriage shape views of Turkish Germans in popular culture, and are also revealing of the role of gender in contemporary Germany. It investigates some key genres-autoethnography, chick lit, ethno-sitcom, wedding film, "gay" Bildungsroman, documentary theater-within which questions of gender and cultural difference are "framed". In new and innovative close readings of literary, filmic, television and dramatic texts, the work reveals the broad significance of cultural portrayals of Turkish-German intimacy.

Fetish Style traces the history, forms and tendencies of sub-cultural fashions that are popular in both mainstream and alternative fashion cultures. Presenting the world of subcultural fetish clothing design in all of its richness and beauty, this book explores the idea of fetish as subversive and repressive as reflected in clothing choices in people of all ages and cultures. Linking the fetishistic aspects of contemporary culture with everyday clothing as dictated by fashion and merchandizing, Fetish Style presents a fascinating study of historical as well as 21st century subcultures. Case studies include the Japanese-influenced 'tribes' of the various Lolita formations, the Shotaru (male Lolita), the club scene, the Goths, the hip-hop fashions and other locally-formed fetishized practices. Fetish Style will be key reading for anyone interested in fetish fashion both past and present.

This book spans three centuries of popular entertainment and everyday culture, showcasing both mainstream and submerged channels and voices to examine how once reviled business values gained supremacy and poisoned the American spirit. The office in popular culture is often depicted as a topsy-turvy parallel universe where psychological disorders are legitimized as "managerial styles" and comically depraved bosses torment those who do the actual work. During the 1950s, the Beats chose denim and the open road over gray flannel suits and office jobs, but today their grandchildren-Generation Y-aggressively covet desk jobs. "Greed Is Good" and Other Fables: Office Life in Popular Culture examines how office life is both extolled and lampooned in popular culture. The book tracks how business values ascended to cultural dominance in the United States today, revealing our incessant struggle between financial and spiritual goals in the pursuit of "freedom" and the fulfillment of the American dream. By drawing upon sources as varied as books, newspapers, magazines, television shows, movies, blogs, message boards, documentaries, public speeches, corporate training films, and employee newsletters, the author provides compelling insights into the range of competing values and ideals interwoven throughout office life.

Fandom is generally viewed as an integral part of everyday life which impacts upon how we form emotional bonds with ourselves and others in a modern, mediated world. Whilst it is inevitable for television series to draw to a close, the reactions of fans have rarely been considered. Williams explores this everyday occurence through close analysis of television fans to examine how they respond to, discuss, and work through their feelings when shows finish airing. Through a range of case studies, including The West Wing (NBC, 2000-2006), Lost (ABC 2004 -2010), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Doctor Who (BBC 1963-1989; 2005-), The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002), Firefly (FOX, 2002) and Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004), Williams considers how fans prepare for the final episodes of shows, how they talk about this experience with fellow fans, and how, through re-viewing, discussion and other fan practices, they seek to maintain their fandom after the show's cessation.

The upper class. The upper crust. Brahmans, blue bloods, and high society. Patricians, plutocrats, and aristocrats. Each describes Americans who have enjoyed generations of wealth and prestige, but such people never use these terms. Old money is preferred. In Old Money America, author John Hazard Forbes shares an insider's view about old money and the life of America's upper class.

Forbes' thirty-five-year career as an art expert and appraiser gave him unusual entre into the houses and lives of the old rich. Along with their collections, he closely examined the customs, manners, and viewpoints of America's upper crust. Old Money America presents a discussion of the: Ironies of old money Who and where of old money Financial secrets of old money Hallmarks of old money Care and housing of old money Secret language of old money Skeletons in the closet of old money Simple life of old money Gear and garb of old money Having known the elites of New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, New England, and the South, Forbes is in a unique position to observe and report on his interaction with these remarkable, if often peculiar, people.

"Sounds American" provides new perspectives on the relationship between nationalism and cultural production by examining how Americans grappled with musical diversity in the early national and antebellum eras.

During this period a resounding call to create a distinctively American music culture emerged as a way to bind together the varied, changing, and uncertain components of the new nation. This played out with particular intensity in the lower Mississippi River valley, and New Orleans especially. Ann Ostendorf argues that this region, often considered an exception to the nation--with its distance from the center of power, its non-British colonial past, and its varied population--actually shared characteristics of many other places eventually incorporated into the country, thus making it a useful case study for the creation of American culture.

Ostendorf conjures the territory's phenomenally diverse "music ways" including grand operas and balls, performances by church choirs and militia bands, and itinerant violin instructors. Music was often associated with "foreigners," in particular Germans, French, Irish, and Africans. For these outsiders, music helped preserve collective identity. But for critics concerned with developing a national culture, this multitude of influences presented a dilemma that led to an obsessive categorization of music with racial, ethnic, or national markers. Ultimately, the shared experience of categorizing difference and consuming this music became a unifying national phenomenon. Experiencing the unknown became a shared part of the American experience.

Have you ever wondered about the biker you see riding through town, the one suited up with black leather, or the one with the colorful patches on his vest? What drives these men to love life on two wheels? Why is riding a motorcycle so vital to their happiness and what lies beneath the smiles of contentment as they savor the warm wind in their hair? Come along for a ride and discover what sets these men apart from each other, and what binds them together in the fascinating world of the American Biker Culture.

HBO's Girls and the Awkward Politics of Gender, Race, and Privilege is a collection of essays that examines the HBO program Girls. Since its premiere in 2012, the series has garnered the attention of individuals from various walks of life. The show has been described in many terms: insightful, out-of-touch, brash, sexist, racist, perverse, complex, edgy, daring, provocative-just to name a few. Overall, there is no doubt that Girls has firmly etched itself in the fabric of early twenty-first-century popular culture. The essays in this book examine the show from various angles including: white privilege; body image; gender; culture; race; sexuality; parental and generational attitudes; third wave feminism; male emasculation and immaturity; hipster, indie, and urban music as it relates to Generation Y and Generation X. By examining these perspectives, this book uncovers many of the most pressing issues that have surfaced in the show, while considering the broader societal implications therein.

This book presents a sweeping view of boxing in the United States and the influence of the sport on American culture. Boxing has long been a popular fixture of American sport and culture, despite its decidedly seedy side (the fact that numerous boxing champions acquired their skills in prison or reform schools, the corruption and greed of certain boxing promoters, and the involvement of the mob in fixing the outcome of many big fights). Yet boxing remains an iconic and widely popular spectator sport, even in light of its decline as a result of the recent burgeoning interest in mixed martial arts (MMA) contests. What had made this sport so enthralling to our nation for such a long period of time? This book contains much more than simple documentation of the significant dates, people, and bouts in the history of American boxing. It reveals why boxing became one of America's leading spectator sports at the turn of the century and examines the factors that have swayed the public's perception of it, thereby affecting its popularity. In Boxing in America, the author provides a compelling view of not only the pugilist sport, but also of our country, our sources of entertainment, and ourselves. Includes information from the early "bare knuckles" era of boxing up to modern-day stars and matchups, presenting the history of boxing in a chronological fashion

The genre of the video clip has been established for more than thirty years, mainly served by the sub genres of video art and music video. This book explores processes of hybridization between music video, film, and video art by presenting current theoretical discourses and engaging them through interviews with well-known artists and directors, bringing to the surface the crucial questions of art practice. The collection discusses topics including postcolonialism, posthumanism, gender, race and class and addresses questions regarding the hybrid media structure of video, the diffusion between content and form, art and commerce as well as pop culture and counterculture. Through the diversity of the areas and interviews included, the book builds on and moves beyond earlier aesthetics-driven perspectives on music video.