'Narratives in Popular Culure, Media and Everyday life provdes a sweeping coverage of the multiple facets of narrative theroy... Berger must be commended for his attempt to put together a reader friendly report on the lives of many rich and famous narrative theories' - Narrative Inquiry

This book includes theoretical approaches as well as a production section that focuses on basic techniques and introductory applications of media studies.

Perspectives on Everyday Life: A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis makes the argument for studying everyday life through a combination of introductory theoretical approaches and a grouping of applications to specific aspects of American culture. The first part of the book addresses the idea of everyday life as considered by distinguished thinkers who have written books about everyday life, such as Sigmund Freud, Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and others. The second part of the book uses theories dealt with in the first part of the book to explore objects—such as suitcases, alarm clocks, milk, pacifiers, pressure cookers, smart speakers, and super-glue—and their part in the various rituals of everyday life in America, revealing their hidden meanings.

The Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies has provided students and the general public alike with a gateway into the study of intercultural communication, public relations and marketing communications since 1984. In this 9th edition, James Watson and Anne Hill provide a detailed compendium of the different facets of personal, group, mass-media and internet communication that continues to be a vital source of information for all those interested in how communication affects our lives. They cover new applications and developments, such as the incorporation of Neuroscience techniques in advertising and marketing. Other updates include Cyber-bullying, Twitter scandals, conduct in media organizations, on-line lobbying, global protesting/petitioning, and gender issues relating to social media in general. While new entries explore the profound shifts that have taken place in the world of communication in recent years, the purpose of this new edition is not necessarily to keep abreast of every new media event but to reflect the trends that influence and prompt such events, such as the Leveson Inquiry and Report and phone hacking via mobile phones. Politics seems to be playing out more on Twitter than in The Times. This volume seeks to make its twenty-first century readers more media literate, as well as more critical consumers of modern news.

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.

This is an original sociological study of breast cancer patients' participation in Internet spaces. While much has been debated about the significance of the Internet, the actual processes of communication in which people engage online are little understood as yet. Exploring the ways in which participants in online spaces configure their experience into a story, the book presents readers with an innovative way of understanding online communication as a socially significant activity. The substantive focus of storytelling online is analyzed sensitively and thoroughly in its specificity as a social phenomenon. At the same time it is connected to a broad range of debates on communication and Internet, health, illness, and social agency.

This book examines the 'open' Dutch-German border and people's everyday practices in relation to this border within the context of Dutch-German relations and the process of European integration. It concentrates on people's perceptions of the 'open' Dutch-German border and people's practices of crossing it - or not. The work also introduces new methodologies and forms of border research, e.g. on borders in people's minds, which are concerned with the construction of bordered spaces and the performed manners of nationalised daily routines. In this context, borders are framed as constructed by narratives and images, but also as representations themselves - as part of popular imaginations.

Our understanding of the concept of narrative has undergone a significant transformation over time, particularly today as new communication technologies are developed and popularized. As new narrative genres are born and old ones undergo great change by the minute, a thorough understanding can shed light on which storytelling elements work best in what format. That deep understanding can then help build strong, satisfying stories. The Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions is an essential publication that examines the relationships between types of narratives in a shifting and widening scope of storytelling forms. While highlighting a wide range of topics including contemporary culture, advertising, and transmedia storytelling, this book is ideally designed for media professionals, content creators, advertisers, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

The past several decades have seen an explosion of interest in narrative, with this multifaceted object of inquiry becoming a central concern in a wide range of disciplinary fields and research contexts. As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and with specific consequences, stories have come to be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change. However, the very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines makes it imperative for scholars, teachers, and students to have access to a comprehensive reference resource.

This book presents a comprehensive and systematic study of the narrative history and narrative methods of Chinese and Western popular fiction from the perspectives of narratology, comparative literature, and art and literature studies by adopting the methodology of parallel comparison. The book is a pioneering work that systematically investigates the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western popular fiction, and traces the root causes leading to the differences. By means of narrative comparison, it explores the conceptual and spiritual correlations and differences between Chinese and Western popular fiction and, by relating them to the root causes of cultural spirit, allows us to gain an insight into the cultural heritage of different nations. The book is structured in line with a cause-and-effect logical sequence and moves from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from history to reality, and from theory to practice. The integration of macro-level theoretical studies and micro-level case studies is both novel and effective. This book was awarded Second Prize at the Sixth Outstanding Achievement Awards in Scientific Research for Chinese Institutions of Higher Learning (Humanities & Social Sciences, 2013).