Front cover image for Popular culture : an introductory text

Popular culture : an introductory text

This title, for use in classrooms across the country, aims to unlock the door for serious popular culture analysis.
Print Book, English, ©1992
Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Bowling Green, OH, ©1992
504 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780879725716, 9780879725723, 0879725710, 0879725729
26733666
Getting to know us: an introduction to the study of popular culture: what is this stuff that dreams are made of?
SECTION 1: TAKING POPULAR CULTURE SERIOUSLY: Seeing what we've said; the top American box-office hits taken seriously / Kevin Lause
How much can you swallow? / Mark Crispin Miller
New legends for old / Jan Harold Brunvand
The cabinet of Dr. Seuss / Alison Lurie
SECTION 2: Songs of the unseen road: myths, beliefs, and values in popular culture
Four morality tales / Robert Reich
Culture and continuity: three American myths in the prints of Currier & Ives / Jack Nachbar
The American myth of success: visions and revisions / Madonna Marsden
Endless love will keep us together: the myth of romantic love and contemporary popular movie love themes / Crystal Kile
SECTION 3: Living in the material world: the meaning and power of popular icons
For whom the bell tolled / Phil Patton
The malling of America / William Severini Kowinski
"Seen through rose-tinted glasses": the Barbie doll in American society / Marilyn Ferris Motz
SECTION 4: Breaking the mold: the meaning and significance of stereotypes in popular culture
The VALS typology / Arnold Mitchell
From the plantation to Bel-Air: a brief history of Black stereotypes / Christopher D. Geist and Angela M.S. Nelson
Yellow devil doctors and opium dens: the Yellow Peril stereotyle in mass media entertainment / Gary Hoppenstand
One size does not fit all: being beautiful, thin and female in America / Jane Caputi with Susan Nance
Section 5: Look! Up in the sky! (And right next door): popular heroes in America
What makes Superman so darned American? / Gary Engle
Henry Ford: symbol of an age / Roderick Nash
The rap on rap / David Samuels
The wretched of the hearth: the undainty feminism of Roseanne Arnold / Barbara Ehrenreich
SECTION 6: All together now: popular rituals in America
Family reunions / Jean Fields
Game Day U.S.A. : The South / Willie Morris, The Midwest / Frank Conroy, The West / Richard Hoffer
Halloween: rite of season, rite of passage / Jack Santino
SECTION 7: Will you repeat that, please! : the meaningful delights of formula in the popular arts
The Western / Thomas Schatz
Television soap opera: "Incest, bigamy, and fatal disease" / Charles Derry
Monster movies: a sexual theory / Walter Evans
Magic and transformation: relationships in popular romance novels, 1950 to the 1980s / Rita C. Hubbard
SECTION 8: Thirteenth generation born: 1961-1981 / William Strauss and Neil Howe