Re-reading Popular Culture is an entertaining investigationof the meanings and value of popular culture today. It explores thetheme of cultural citizenship by combining textual analysis andmedia reception theory to analyze popular culture. Includes such contemporary issues as the rewriting ofmasculinity after the success of feminism, and the layers ofmeaning in semi-public and private talk of multiculturalism andethnicity Traces its topics across a variety of media forms and texts,including sports; detective fiction and police series; andchildren’s television and games Clearly and accessibly written for the student, scholar, andgeneral reader.

Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives seeks to define pop culture by exploring the ways that it fulfills our human desire for meaning. The second edition investigates current contexts for popular culture, including the rise of the digital global village through new technology and offers up-to-date examples that connect with today's students.

Richard Hoggart has been one of the leading cultural commentators of the last sixty years. He was the first literary critic to take the working class seriously and to extend the parameters of literary criticism to include popular culture. Hoggart put the working class on the cultural map. He differentiated between what was offered by the “popular providers” (media, popular fiction, advertisements) and the resilient culture of working-class people themselves. Hoggart’s most famous work is the seminal The Uses of Literacy. Part II (written first) offers a searing indictment of the specious populism and banality of popular newspapers and magazines, the fake “pally patter” of the tabloids and of adverts aimed at ordinary people, and the literary flatness and moral emptiness of much popular fiction. Part I celebrates the resilient culture of working-class people themselves and offers a basis for the argument that working-class people deserve better than what passes for popular culture. Though best known for The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart has been a prolific writer, publishing twenty-seven books, including two in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven. These range from works of cultural analysis such as The Way We Live Now, to works of personal reflection such as First and Last Things and Promises to Keep, and to collections of essays on a wide variety of topics, such as the two volumes of Speaking to Each Other, Between Two Worlds and An English Temper. One of his most important contributions to the transformation of perceptions of class and culture was the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the early 1960s. For Hoggart, public service is a duty of the intellectual. Therefore he has not lived in the ivory tower but has engaged in society, striving for change from within. He worked for five years as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO and has undertaken many activities in arts, culture, broadcasting and education, including: the Albermarle Committee on Youth Services, the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, Reith Lecturer, Chair of the Broadcasting Research Unit, Vice-Chair of the Arts Council, Chair of the Statesman and Nation Publishing Company, Chair of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education and member of the British Board of Film Classification Appeals Committee. Hoggart was a leading witness for the defence in the trial at the Old Bailey in 1960 of Penguin Books Ltd. for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His evidence is widely acknowledged to have been central in leading to the acquittal, which marked a watershed in public perception and shifted cultural parameters. Hoggart was also the first British critic to take TV and radio seriously. He made a number of critical interventions: his Reith lectures, his contributions to the report of the Pilkington Committee and his works on media, including Only Connect: on the Nature and Quality of Mass Communications, The Mass Media: A New Colonialism, and Mass Media in Mass Society. Hated by Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse, Hoggart nevertheless, strove to serve culture in the public sphere, as an important extension of his ideas about the need for cultural quality. This volume affirms the importance of Richard Hoggart, focusing, in particular, on new understandings of his life, of the importance of literature and literary criticism to his method, and of his significant role in literary, cultural and educational shifts from the fifties onwards. It locates Hoggart’s work and identifies his influence within multiple contexts: the working-class and “angry young man” novels of the fifties and sixties; the Lady Chatterley trial and resulting literary and cultural change; the shift from the “new criticism” to a broader field of cultural enquiry; the rise of cultural studies; and educational reforms from the fifties onwards.

This collection brings together leading research on contemporary and popular culture, focussing on marginalised voices and representations; socially marginalised, marginalised in media and media scholarship. It spans five continents, with contributions on topics like gender, sexuality, nation, disability, disciplinary boundaries, youth and age.

The book takes its lead from academic Annamaria Pagliaro’s experience straddling Australia and Italy over a thirty-year period. As both former colleagues and collaborators of Pagliaro, we editors intend to open a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the international research landscape in the fields of Italian and Anglophone studies, starting from Pagliaro’s own contribution to the creation of relations between the two cultures in the period that saw her work transnationally as Director of the Monash University Prato Centre (2005-2008).

Whether or not we like to admit it, pop culture is a lens through which we alternately view and shape the world around us. When it comes to feminism, pop culture aids us in translating feminist philosophies, issues, and concepts into everyday language, making them relevant and relatable. In Feminism and Pop Culture, author and cofounder of Bitch magazine Andi Zeisler traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1940s to the present and beyond. With a comprehensive overview of the intertwining relationship between women and pop culture, this book is an ideal introduction to discussing feminism and daily life.

This book is an outgrowth of an international conference – The Black Body: Imagining, Writing, and Re(Reading) – held at DePaul University, Chicago in 2004. The various contributing authors critically examine the changing discourses on the black body to address how it has been constituted as a site for construction and maintenance of social and political power. Drawing examples from Europe, Africa, the United States as well as other places in the Black Diaspora, the subject matter in this book discusses the raced, gendered, classed and culturally produced discourses about the black body. Through its examination of these and related issues, this book contributes to a dialogue across various disciplines about the black body, its meanings and negotiations as read, interpreted, and imagined in different frames of perception and imagination. Print editions not for sale in Sub-Saharan Africa. This book is part of Routledge’s co-published series 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa, in collaboration with UNISA Press, which reflects on the past years of a democratic South Africa and assesses the future opportunities and challenges.

The book investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political efforts in the twentieth century, and how this has indelibly affected cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the symbol through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this book considers the relationship between popular culture and media, activist politics, and cultural memory. Using hauntological theories of memory and temporality, and literary, screen, and cultural studies methodologies, this book considers how popular culture remembers, misremembers, and forgets usable pasts, and the uses (and misuses) of these memories for feminist politics. Given the ubiquity of the witch in popular culture, politics and activism since 2016, this book is a timely examination of the range of meanings inherent to the figure, and is an important study of how cultural symbols like the witch inherit paradoxical memories, histories, and politics. The book will be valuable for scholars across disciplines, including witchcraft studies, feminist philosophy and history, memory studies, and popular culture studies.

This multidisciplinary collection of readings offers suggestive new interpretations of Richard Wagner's ideological position in German history. The issues discussed range from the biographical--the reasons for Wagner's travels, his spotted political life--to the aesthetic and ideological, regarding his re-creation of medieval Nuremberg, his representations of gender and nationality, his vocal iconography, his anti-Semitism, and his vegetarianarguments, and, finally, his musical heirs. The essays are written by Tamara S. Evans, Edward R. Haymes, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Peter Morris-Keitel, Alexa Larson-Thorisch, Audrius Dundzila, Marc A. Weiner, Jost Hermand, Frank Trommler, and Hans Rudolf Vaget. Avoiding journalistic or iconoclastic approaches to Wagner, these writers depart from the usual uncritical admiration of earlier scholars to develop a stimulating and ultimately cohesive collection of new perspectives.

How do students’ online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries including Australia, Lebanon, Nepal, Qatar, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. The authors examine issues of theory, identity, and pedagogy as they address participatory popular culture sites such as fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, anime, memes, and comics and graphic novels. Uniquely bringing together scholarship about online literacy practices and the growing body of work on participatory popular culture, New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture across Borders makes distinctive contributions to an emerging field of study, pushing forward scholarship about literacy and identity in cross-cultural situations and advancing important conversations about issues of global flows and local responses to popular culture.