You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Noting that the variation between the playwrights can be as great as between men and women, and acknowledging that her subjects are limited to a narrow class and race population, Detsi-Diamanti the cultural and historical specificity of women playwrights of the period and the interrelationship between their dramatic efforts and the formation of an American national and literary identity. Her major themes are metaphors of freedom, industrial capitalism, and gender perspective and ideology.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, school air-raid drills, bomb shelters, and unnerving civil defense films served as constant reminders of the looming threat of nuclear war. Throughout America, a widespread civil defense effort used town meetings, public school educational programs, and the mass media--television, radio, and especially, motion pictures--to mobilize every citizen for a protracted Cold War. This volume explores how American popular culture has portrayed civil defense from mid-twentieth century to the immediate post-September 11 era. With analysis of everything from early government propaganda films and 1950s science fiction films to Happy Days, the Reagan-era TV movie The Day After, and the small-screen nostalgia trend after 9/11, it shows how popular culture reflects American fears and the hope of preparedness.
This study explores how the definition of the medium, as well as its language, readership, genre conventions, and marketing and distribution strategies, have kept comic books within the realm of popular culture. Since comics have been studied mostly in relation to mass media and its influence on society, there is a void in the analysis of the critical issues related to comics as a distinct genre and art form. By focusing on comics as narratives and investigating their formal and structural aspects, as well as the unique reading process they demand, this study presents a unique contribution to the current literature on comics, and helps clarify concepts and definitions useful in studying the medium. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alberta, 1995; revised with new preface, bibliography, and index)
This book is the first comprehensive scholarly study of religious images in popular music. Examining bestsellers from 1906 to 1971, the work explores the role religious images have in the secularization of American culture. Popular music lyrics that express an adherence to a sacred order are couched in inoffensive, content-less language. These lyrics of civility reflect and shape the increasing secularization of American culture in the twentieth century. The analysis focuses primarily on the way these lyrics reduce the meaning of the terms and theology of the Biblical faith. The aesthetic of civility carries over into theology, the narratives, and the accompanying instrumental arrangements o...
First published in 1998. In June 1831 the New York Magdalen Society published its first annual report. The Society charged that widespread sexual deviation, primarily in the form of prostitution, existed in New York City. The Magdalen Report claimed that approximately ten thousand women earned their livings as public prostitutes, and another ten thousand were “private or part-time prostitutes.” The Magdalen Society’s establishment and the subsequent publication of the Magdalen Report marked the beginning of a crusade in New York City to curtail sexual deviation and this study looks at the changes and reforms that took place.
Unfathomably merciless and powerful, the atomic bomb has left its indelible mark on film. In Atomic Bomb Cinema, Jerome F. Shapiro unearths the unspoken legacy of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and its complex aftermath in American and Japanese cinema. According to Shapiro, a "Bomb film" is never simply an exercise in ideology or paranoia. He examines hundreds of films like Godzilla, Dr. Strangelove, and The Terminator as a body of work held together by ancient narrative and symbolic traditions that extol survival under devastating conditions. Drawing extensively on both English-language and Japanese-language sources, Shapiro argues that such films not only grapple with our nuclear anxieties, but also offer signs of hope that humanity is capable of repairing a damaged and divided world. www.atomicbombcinema.com
This book addresses social and cultural issues both peculiarly Southern and generally American, as it surveys Memphis, Tennessee, between World War II and 1990, when lesbians and gay men developed group identity and community institutions first as a defense in the closeted 1950s, then as part of the liberationist 1970s, and, in the 1980s, as a response to the spread of AIDS and the demands of other marginalized groups for recognition, inclusion, and power.
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Pathologist Toni Day is faced with a situation most pathologists only joke about. Beulah Pritchard comes back to life on her autopsy table. Beulah was a coworker of Toni's at Cascade Perrine Regional Medical Center, where she was known as a merciless gossip, happiest to attack female doctors with slander and lies. Beulah drove her car off a snow-covered road with her husband's dead body in the trunk. Although Beulah survived her injuries and hypothermia, she died, only to come alive on Toni's table-and die again. Beulah's estranged sister threatens to sue both Toni and the hospital for wrongful death, but it's soon apparent both Beulah and her husband were murdered. To save her career and the hospital, Toni investigates the mysterious deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard. Her inquiries uncover a decades-old scheme of embezzlement, blackmail, and more. Soon, someone is on Toni's tail: the killer, desperate to stop the curious pathologist from uncovering the truth. In order to stay alive, Toni must confront a vicious and clever murderer who will do anything to keep the past under wraps.