The reactionary Comicsgate campaign against alleged “forced” diversity in superhero comics revealed the extent to which comics have become a key battleground in America's Culture Wars. In the first in-depth scholarly study of Marvel Comics' most recent engagement with progressive politics, Superhero Culture Wars explores how the drive towards greater diversity among its characters and creators has interacted with the company's commercial marketing and its traditional fan base. Along the way the book covers such topics as: · Major characters such as Miles Morales's Spider-man, Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel, Jane Foster's Thor, Sam Wilson's Captain America and the Secret Empire series' turncoat Captain America · Creators such as G. Willow Wilson, Jason Aaron, Nick Spencer and Michael Bendis · Marketing, the Marvel Universe, and online fan culture Superhero Culture Wars demonstrates how the marketing of Marvel comics as politically progressive has both indelibly shaped its in-world universe and characters, and led to conflicts between its corporate interests, its creators, and it audience.

Why has identity become so central to judging art today? Why are some groups reluctant to defend free speech within culture? Has state support made artists poorer not richer? How does the movement for social justice influence cultural production? Why is Post-Modernism dominant in the art world? Why are consumers of comic books so bitterly divided? In Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism Alexander Adams examines a series of pressing issues in today's culture: censorship, Islamism, Feminism, identity politics, historical reparations and public arts policy. Through a series of linked essays, Culture War exposes connections between seemingly unrelated events and trends in high and popular cultures. From fine art to superhero comics, from political cartoons to museum policy, certain persistent ideas underpin the most contentious issues today. Adams draws on history, philosophy, politics and cultural criticism to explain the reasoning of creators, consumers and critics and to expose some uncomfortable truths.

This compilation of essential information on 100 superheroes from comic book issues, various print and online references, and scholarly analyses provides readers all of the relevant material on superheroes in one place. The American Superhero: Encyclopedia of Caped Crusaders in History covers the history of superheroes and superheroines in America from approximately 1938–2010 in an intentionally inclusive manner. The book features a chronology of important dates in superhero history, five thematic essays covering the overall history of superheroes, and 100 A–Z entries on various superheroes. Complementing the entries are sidebars of important figures or events and a glossary of terms in superhero research. Designed for anyone beginning to research superheroes and superheroines, The American Superhero contains a wide variety of facts, figures, and features about caped crusaders and shows their importance in American history. Further, it collects and verifies information that otherwise would require hours of looking through multiple books and websites to find.

This collection of essays investigates such diverse vehicles for war commemoration as poems, battlefield tours, souvenirs, books, films, architectural structures, comics, websites, and video games. Drawing on essayists from Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Israel and the United States, this work explores the evolution from traditional to contemporary forms of war commemoration while addressing the fundamental question of whether these new forms of memorial are meant to encourage the remembering or the forgetting of the experience of war, as well as what implications the process of commemoration may have for the continuation of the modern nation state. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Superheroes and Digital Perspectives: Super Data examines the intersection of the superhero genre and issues of the internet, data, and digital media to provide not only a posthuman study of the superhero, but also an examination of the ways in which the superhero acts as a lens for our interactions with technology. Contributions to this collection range from the virality of the superhero as political expression to human-nonhuman relations, social expectations, and trends in cultural products. Providing fruitful, rigorous analysis of this genre in the context of ubiquitous handheld networked technology, social media, and data harvesting techniques, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of media studies, posthuman studies, communication, and popular culture.

Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts offers the first comprehensive study of how Marvel has racially diversified its lineup and reimagined what a superhero might look like in the twenty-first century. It examines how they have revitalized older characters like Black Panther, recast legacy heroes like Ms. Marvel, and developed new ones like the Latina Miss America.

This book examines mass communication and civic participation in the age of oil, analyzing the rhetorical and discursive ways that governments and corporations shape public opinion and public policy and activists attempt to reframe public debates to resist corporate framing. In the twenty-first century, oil has become a subject of civic deliberation. Environmental concerns have intensified, questions of indigenous rights have arisen, and private and public investment in energy companies has become open to deliberation. International contributors use local events as a starting point to explore larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. This interdisciplinary collection synthesizes work in the energy humanities, rhetorical studies and environmental studies to analyze the global discourse of oil from the start of the twentieth century into the era of transnational corporations of the 21st century. This book will be a vital text for scholars in communication studies, the energy humanities and in environmental studies. Case studies are framed accessibly, and the theoretical lenses are accessible across disciplines, making it ideal for a post-graduate and advanced undergraduate audience in these fields.

Analyzes the many ways in which comic book and film superheroes have been revised or rewritten in response to changes in real-world politics, social mores, and popular culture.

William D. Romanowski brings a comprehensive, systematic, historically revealing and personally challenging Christian perspective to the contemporary debate over culture.

The articles assembled in Culture Wars and Literature in the French Third Republic describe and analyze the ever-widening attempts in the early years of the Third Republic (1870-1914) to mobilize literary phenomena for the purposes of political and social warfare. Literature became the preferred site in which the human implications of the fiercest and most widespread of these culture wars, the battles over national identity waged between proponents of secular and religious education, were articulated, dramatized and appraised. In studies of Erckmann-Chatrian and Vallès, Rachilde and Colette, the Goncourt brothers and Marcelle Tinayre, La Fontaine and Corneille, the song-writer Jules Jouy and the theater critic Francisque Sarcey among others, some of these essays open up new perspectives on well-known issues such as education, the definition of national classics, Boulangism and womenâ (TM)s liberation, while others bring to light hitherto unsuspected connections between apparently disparate problems like decadence, anarchism and feminism, the mystery of literariness and the ban on Muslim headscarves, or the posthumous publication of private letters and the Stateâ (TM)s interest in cultural and literary heroes. The final piece crystallizes the fundamental conflict of democratization: the tension between the republican desire for popular participation and the fear of the consequences of that participation by an uncultured public.