The rapid development of the TV series in the twenty-first century has resulted in an emergence of new aesthetic, cultural, and social trends. The development has influenced both the mainstream of popular culture and reception practices of audiences across nations and platforms. This book observes how the means employed in key contemporary TV series texts and a specific thematic variety have promoted new reception styles and redefined conventional interpretive practices. The authors analyze a variety of series released since 2000 to discuss historical (dis)continuities of genres and conventions, and observe how interpretive competences promoted by the rhetoric of contemporary TV series result from, and are polemical with, the conventions of visual and verbal cultures of preceding decades.

This study is an analysis of the novels Black Water (1992), Blonde (2000), and My Sister, My Love (2008) by Joyce Carol Oates. Based on real-life characters (Mary Jo Kopechne, Marilyn Monroe, JonBenet Ramsey), these works blend fact and fiction, historical and poetic truth, and create a new way to recount facts that allow the writer to give a new voice to people who cannot speak for themselves anymore. The present book addresses the stories behind the novels, their genre and stylistic features, but is also an exploration of several aspects of American culture and society and their issues connected to consumerism, the cult of beauty and celebrity, and how they affect American women's lives and power relations with men.