Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

The world has been witnessing a long unfolding process of urbanization that not only has altered the structural basis of society in terms of political economy, but has also symbolically relegated rural people and life to a secondary or deviant status through an ideology of urbanormativity. Both structural and cultural changes rooted in urbanization are connected in complex ways to spatial arrangements that can be described in terms of inequality and uneven development. Through a focus on localities, Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society examines the implications of urbanization and its corresponding ideology. Urbanormativity justifies rural domination by holding urban life as the standard against which rural forms are compared and deemed to be irregular, inferior, or deviant. Urban production, as conceptualized in this book, is inherently exploitative of rural resources natural, social, cultural, and symbolic. As this exploitation advances, a wake of entropic conditions is left behind in the forms of degraded landscapes, broken social institutions, and denigrated communities, cultures and identities. Edited by Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas, Studies in Urbanormativity engages a topic on which scholars have been surprisingly silent. Designed for advancing theory and practice, the chapters provide new theoretical tools for understanding the complex relationship between the urban and rural. While primarily intended for scholars and practitioners interested in rural life, rural policy, and community development, the insights of this book will also be of interest to scholars studying various forms of cultural and social domination, as well as identity politics.

Knowing Your Place directs groundbreaking attention to the role of rural and urban places in identity construction. Written to redress the longstanding neglect and denigration of the rural, this book argues that the cultural dominance of the city has been reinforced by postmodern theory's near fixation on the urban and the sophisticated.
The essays explore rural identity in a number of cultures and situations, and look at issues of contemporary interest. Topics covered include the uses of popular and high culture, the explosion of high technology, the social and economic impact of ecological policy, the role of labor in the global marketplace, museum curatorship, and post-colonial politics. Throughout, the essays address the many ways in which place identity alters and influences the experience of race, class, gender and ethnicity.

Knowing Your Place directs groundbreaking attention to the role of rural and urban places in identity construction. Written to redress the longstanding neglect and denigration of the rural, this book argues that the cultural dominance of the city has been reinforced by postmodern theory's near fixation on the urban and the sophisticated.
The essays explore rural identity in a number of cultures and situations, and look at issues of contemporary interest. Topics covered include the uses of popular and high culture, the explosion of high technology, the social and economic impact of ecological policy, the role of labor in the global marketplace, museum curatorship, and post-colonial politics. Throughout, the essays address the many ways in which place identity alters and influences the experience of race, class, gender and ethnicity.

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

This book is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. The author compares hard country music to mainstream country music and to "high" culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierachy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk, buying into the standards of "higher" culture.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature--the willingness of great artists and writers to scandalize their spectators through critical frankness, complexity, and beauty. Sontag's life and thought were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a range of subjects--theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, and illness--and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also provoked scorn. Her living was the embodiment of scandal.

In this collection, Terry Castle, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, and other leading scholars revisit Sontag's groundbreaking life and work. "Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," "Letter from Hanoi," "On Photography," "Illness as Metaphor," "I, Etcetera," and "The Volcano Lover"--these works form the center of essays no less passionate and imaginative than Sontag herself. Debating questions raised by the thinker's own images and identities, including her sexuality, these works question Sontag's status as a female intellectual and her parallel interest in ambitious and prophetic fictional women; her ambivalence toward popular culture; and her personal and professional "scandals." Paired with rare photographs and illustrations, this timely anthology expands our understanding of Sontag's images and power.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature--the willingness of great artists and writers to scandalize their spectators through critical frankness, complexity, and beauty. Sontag's life and thought were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a range of subjects--theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, and illness--and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also provoked scorn. Her living was the embodiment of scandal.

In this collection, Terry Castle, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, and other leading scholars revisit Sontag's groundbreaking life and work. "Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," "Letter from Hanoi," "On Photography," "Illness as Metaphor," "I, Etcetera," and "The Volcano Lover"--these works form the center of essays no less passionate and imaginative than Sontag herself. Debating questions raised by the thinker's own images and identities, including her sexuality, these works question Sontag's status as a female intellectual and her parallel interest in ambitious and prophetic fictional women; her ambivalence toward popular culture; and her personal and professional "scandals." Paired with rare photographs and illustrations, this timely anthology expands our understanding of Sontag's images and power.