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Popular Culture: An Introductory Text provides the means for a new examination of the different faces of the American character in both its historical and contemporary identities. The text is highlighted by a series of extensive introductions to various categories of popular culture and by essays that demonstrate how the methods discussed in the introductions can be applied. This volume is an exciting beginning for the study of the materials of everyday life that define our culture and confirm our individual senses of identity.
How can Christianity continue to rejoice over a redemption that came at the cost of the violent suffering and death of Jesus Christ? In the wake of increasing revulsion toward oppression and abuse—both historic and contemporary—traditionally Protestant and evangelical theology is in the precarious position of defending one of its cardinal doctrines amidst a host of compelling critiques and alternatives. In I Will Repay, Dennis Oh explores how soteriology rooted in Scripture and resonant with tradition can also be conversant with the cinematic experience offered by popular films. It proposes a narrative reenvisioning of the mechanism of atonement that both supports and extends traditional theological categories and vocabularies while retaining the cross-centered conviction of an evangelical gospel.
Emerging from the conference on "The Future of Popular Culture Studies in the Twenty-First Century," held in June of 1992 at Bowling Green, Ohio to honor the academic career of Ray Browne (retired chair, Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State U.) and to chart Popular Culture Studies into the next century, this collection of essays includes five of Browne's signal articles and a Ray Browne bibliography. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced his third novel, a slim work for which he had high expectations. Despite such hopes, the novel received mixed reviews and lackluster sales. Over the decades, however, the reputation of The Great Gatsby has grown and millions of copies have been sold. One of the bestselling novels of all time, it is also considered one of the most significant achievements in twentieth-century fiction. But what makes Gatsby great? Why do we still care about this book more than eighty-five years after it was published? And how does Gatsby help us make sense of our own lives and times? In Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, Bob Batchelor explores the bi...
Asian American resistance to Orientalism -- the Western tradition dealing with the subject and subjugation of the East -- is usually assumed. And yet, as this provocative work demonstrates, in order to refute racist stereotypes they must first be evoked, and in the process the two often become entangled. Sheng-mei Ma shows how the distinguished careers of post-1960s Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Frank Chin, and David Henry Hwang reveal that while Asian American identity is constructed in reaction to Orientalism, the two cultural forces are not necessarily at odds. The vigor with which these Asian Americans revolt against Orientalism in fact tacitly acknowledges the family lineage of the two.
Hollywood in the Neighborhood presents a vivid new picture of how movies entered the American heartland—the thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages far from the East and West Coast film centers. Using a broad range of research sources, essays from scholars including Richard Abel, Robert Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Terry Lindvall, and Greg Waller examine in detail the social and cultural changes this new form of entertainment brought to towns from Gastonia, North Carolina to Placerville, California, and from Norfolk, Virginia to rural Ontario and beyond. Emphasizing the roles of local exhibitors, neighborhood audiences, regional cultures, and the growing national mass media, their essays chart how motion pictures so quickly and successfully moved into old opera houses and glittering new picture palaces on Main Streets across America.
SCMS Award Winner "Best Edited Collection" The standard analytical category of "national cinema" has increasingly been called into question by the category of the "transnational." This anthology examines the premises and consequences of the coexistence of these two categories and the parameters of historiographical approaches that cross the borders of nation-states. The three sections of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives cover the geopolitical imaginary, transnational cinematic institutions, and the uneven flow of words and images.
In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation--as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner--all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.
This is the first comprehensive, fully-researched account of the historical and contemporary development of the traditional martial arts genre in the Chinese cinema known as wuxia (literal translation: martial chivalry) - a genre which audiences around the world became familiar with through the phenomenal 'crossover' hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The book unveils rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema in the late 1920s, and from the 1950s onwards, in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries. Key attractions of the book are analyses of:*The history of the tradition as it began in the Shanghai cinema, its rise and popularity as a serialized form in the silent cinema of the late 1920s, and its eventual prohibition by the government in 1931.*
How does rock music impact culture? According to authors B. Lee Cooper and Wayne S. Haney, it is central to the definition of society and has had a great impact on shaping American culture. In Rock Music in American Popular Culture, insightful essays and book reviews explore ways popular culture items can be used to explore American values. This fascinating book is arranged alphabetically for quick and easy reference to specific topics, but the book is equally enjoyable to read straight through. The influence of rock era music is evident throughout the text, demonstrating how various topics in the popular culture field are interconnected. Students in popular culture survey courses and American studies classes will be fascinated by these unique explorations of how family businesses, games, nursery rhymes, rock and roll legends, and other musical ventures shed light on our society and how they have shaped American values over the years.