Exploring fiction, film and art from across the USA, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia, 'New Suburban Stories' brings together new research from leading international scholars to examine cultural representations of the suburbs, home to a rapidly increasing proportion of the world's population. Focusing in particular on works that challenge conventional attitudes to suburbia, the book considers how suburban communities have taken control of their own representation to tell their own stories in contemporary novels, poetry, autobiography, cinema, social media and public art.

Richard Linklater is a popular American filmmaker who is widely celebrated for the breadth of his oeuvre. Over the past three decades, Linklater has directed more than twenty features, ranging from non-linear independent films to Hollywood genre entertainment. Despite the popularity of Linklater's rich and varied body of work--and perhaps also because of this generic diversity--he remains under-represented in critical and scholarly fora. ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater addresses this oversight, bringing together twelve original essays attending to Linklater as a filmmaker whose work engages with contemporary debates in American politics, gender, youth, and activism as well as significant concepts in film studies, including time and duration, rhythm, and movement. Together these essays form a dialogue on Linklater's ongoing role in contemporary American popular culture, and the impact his work has on discussions within (and beyond) film studies.

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture. By relating cutting-edge analyses of contemporary literature, the visual arts and film and television to recent social, technological and economic developments, the volume provides both a map and an itinerary of today's metamodern cultural landscape. As its organising principle, the book takes Fredric Jameson's canonical arguments about the waning of historicity, affect and depth in the postmodern culture of western capitalist societies in the twentieth century, and re-evaluates and reconceptualises these notions in a twenty-first century context. In doing so, it shows that the contemporary moment should be regarded as a transitional period from the postmodern and into the metamodern cultural moment.

Exploring fiction, film and art from across the USA, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia, New Suburban Stories brings together new research from leading international scholars to examine cultural representations of the suburbs, home to a rapidly increasing proportion of the world's population. Focussing in particular on works that challenge conventional attitudes to suburbia, the book considers how suburban communities have taken control of their own representation to tell their own stories in contemporary novels, poetry, autobiography, cinema, social media and public art.

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture. By relating cutting-edge analyses of contemporary literature, the visual arts and film and television to recent social, technological and economic developments, the volume provides both a map and an itinerary of today's metamodern cultural landscape. As its organising principle, the book takes Fredric Jameson's canonical arguments about the waning of historicity, affect and depth in the postmodern culture of western capitalist societies in the twentieth century, and re-evaluates and reconceptualises these notions in a twenty-first century context. In doing so, it shows that the contemporary moment should be regarded as a transitional period from the postmodern and into the metamodern cultural moment.

'The spatial sensibility of the suburb in recent US film and TV is brilliantly explored and theorized in this book. Without reducing their complexity, Vermeulen elegantly shows what suburbs do on screen, as representations and as ways for fictional characters and for viewers to experience contemporary place and space.' JONATHAN BIGNELL, Professor of Television and Film, University of Reading SUBURBIA. Say the word and a stream of images passes before your eyes: white picket fence, neatly mown lawns, winding roads nicely lined with trees, pastel-tinted bungalows, bored housewives, conspicuous consumption. We all know what the suburbs are about. Or do we? This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognise them as suburbs? How do they function? By exploring in detail the hometowns of Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Happiness, Pleasantville, Brick and The Chumscrubber, Scenes from the Suburbs examines what it means to be suburban today. An essential read for academics concerned with the ways in which our understandings of space and place change, this book is particularly relevant for students and researchers in Suburban Studies, Film & Television Studies and Urban Geography.