Popular Culture category: 4839 books

Examining a wide range of Japanese videogames, including arcade fighting games, PC-based strategy games and console JRPGs, this book assesses their cultural significance and shows how gameplay and context can be analyzed together to understand videogames as a dynamic mode of artistic expression. Well-known...

Landscript 5 examines Material Culture in landscape architecture theory and design. Designed landscapes are temporal assemblages of extant and introduced materials, constructed and maintained through the efforts of human labor, mediated through non-human forces, and shaped by constantly changing cultural...

In this book, Dean Kowalski argues that filmmakers can “do” philosophy when creating a fictional narrative film, and utilizes a careful and extensive analysis of Joss Whedon’s fictive creations—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and The Cabin in the Woods (among others)—to...

Contemporary social and cultural life is increasingly organised around a logic of self-transformation, where changing the body is seen as key. Transforming Images examines how the future functions within this transformative logic to indicate the potential of a materially better time. The book explores...

America is fascinated with celebrities—from chefs to athletes to television, movie, and rock stars, and even to people who are only famous for being famous. This book explores the effect of celebrity on Americans' public and private lives. The contributors examine how celebrities bring about change,...

Through intensive fieldwork lasting over eighteen months, this book demonstrates that the stand-up comedy venue is a dynamic space where social actors contest and reproduce dominant understandings of race, class, and gender in ways that transcend the joke-work performed on stage. Situated within the...

This is a personal journey through history and politics on the back of the narrator’s own experiences in the two countries he has come to love most: Greece and England. The impact of momentous events over the years on everyday lives and the ensuing struggle for survival are vividly, poetically and...

American culture is undergoing some seismic shifts and this has left many people off-balance and ill-prepared to manage their lives in order to achieve the American Dream. With 95 years of practice, the author identifies some fundamental ideas that can help people attain the success they wish for. The...

In Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies, authors Shelley Ingram, Willow G. Mullins, and Todd Richardson talk about things folklorists don’t usually talk about. They ponder the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever...

With contributions by Leonie Brialey, MJ Clarke, Roy T. Cook, Joseph J. Darowski, Ian Gordon, Gene Kannenberg Jr., Christopher P. Lehman, Anne C. McCarthy, Ben Owen, Lara Saguisag, Ben Saunders, Jeffrey O. Segrave, and Michael Tisserand The Comics of Charles Schulz collects new essays on the...

Through the perspectives of selected best-selling novels from the end of World War II to the end of the 20th century—including The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, Jaws, Beloved, The Silence of the Lambs, and Jurassic Park—this book examines the crucial issues the U.S....

Headed "Fascinating Tour of the 1940s for Movie Buffs", the following review by Maria Trefely-Deutch appeared in The Sunday Telegraph: John Howard Reid’s latest offering is every bit as idiosyncratic as his previous books in this series, and equally compulsive reading for film buffs. The...

In this thorough history, the author demonstrates, via the popular literature (primarily pulp magazines and comic books) of the 1920s to about 1960, that the stories therein drew their definitions of heroism and villainy from an overarching, nativist fear of outsiders that had existed before World...

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles--ranging...