Popular Culture

Research in and around popular culture continues to flourish. And its study is, more than ever, a key component of Media and Communications Studies courses, and a vital part of Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology curricula. The sheer scale of the available research exploring popular culture—and the breadth and complexity of the canon on which it draws—makes this new four-volume Routledge collection especially timely. It answers the urgent need for a wide-ranging collection which provides ready access to the key items of scholarly literature, material that is often inaccessible or scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books from a broad range of disciplines. Volume I (‘History and Theory’) brings together the best work on the rise of popular culture as a subject for serious academic study, uncovering its roots and exploring its rapid development in the years after the Second World War. Key debates (e.g. between base and superstructure, hegemony and control, colonialism and postcolonialism) are traced to provide users with a clear understanding of the foundational approaches that inform the more applied examinations of popular culture in the succeeding volumes. Volume II assembles the most important thinking on ‘Ideology and Representation’, including work drawn from feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Volume III gathers crucial work on ‘Fissures and Fusions’, while the last volume in the set is organized around ‘Critical Departures’. Popular Culture is supplemented with a full index, and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research and reference resource.