"Rethinking Popular Culture" selects some of the best and most important recent work analyzing popular culture. Drawing upon recent developments in cultural theory and the exciting new techniques of critical analysis, the essays in this volume break down disciplinary boundaries in a fresh and innovative fashion. Eclectic and wide-ranging, "Rethinking Popular Culture" includes works by authors in the humanities and social sciences. The essays touch on a variety of features of popular culture, from photography to fashion, romance novels to television, jokes to food habits. The editors' comprehensive introduction sets each essay in the context of intellectual developments in history, sociology, literature, and anthropology and in the study of popular culture as a whole. Arguing that recent scholarship has revolutionized our understanding of popular culture, the editors articulate what that new perspective is while introducing some of the most influential and important work that gave rise to it.
Rethinking Popular Culture, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson Printing and the People, Natalie Zemon Davis Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin, Robert Darnton The Rise of the Saloon, Roy Rosenzweig William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation, Lawrence W. Levine The Dream World of Mass Consumption, Rosalind Williams Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, Clifford Geertz La Pensee Bourgeoise, Marshall Sahlins Jokes, Mary Douglas Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems, Paul Hirsch Movies of the Week, Todd Gitlin Sport and Social Class, Pierre Bourdieu Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America, Paul DiMaggio The Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, Raymond Williams The Suit and the Photograph, John Berger Written Clothing, Roland Barthes What Is an Author? Michel Foucault Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading, Janice Radway
