Authors: Dominic Strinati (Editor), Stephen Wagg
ISBN-13: 9780415063265, ISBN-10: 0415063264
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
Date Published: December 1992
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Come On Down? presents an introduction to popular media culture in Britain since 1945. The essays in this collection discuss the ways in which popular culture can be studied, understood, and appreciated, while addressing key analytical issues and some of its most important forms and processes.
Published here for the first time, the essays in Come On Down? analyze some of popular culture's leading and most representative expressions: soap operas, game shows, children's television, popular music, comedy, advertising in the media, consumerism, and Americanization and popular culture in Britain. The diversity of both subject matter and argument is the most distinctive feature of this collection, making it a much-needed and accessible, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of popular media culture.
The contributors, many of them leading figures in their respective areas of study, represent a number of different approaches which themselves reflect the diversity and promise of contemporary theoretical debate. Their studies encompass issues such as the economics of popular culture, its textual complexity, and its interpretations by audiences, as well as concepts such as ideology, material culture, and postmodernism.
Notes on contributors | ||
Introduction: Come on down? - popular culture today | 1 | |
1 | Homeward Bound: Leisure, popular culture and consumer capitalism | 9 |
2 | The taste of America: Americanization and popular culture in Britain | 46 |
3 | The impossibility of Best: Enterprise meets domesticity in the practical women's magazines of the 1980s | 82 |
4 | From the East End to EastEnders: Representations of the working class, 1890-1990 | 116 |
5 | British soaps in the 1980s | 133 |
6 | 'One I made earlier': Media, popular culture and the politics of childhood | 150 |
7 | The price is right but the moments are sticky: Television, quiz and game shows, and popular culture | 179 |
8 | Embedded persuasions: The fall and rise of integrated advertising | 202 |
9 | 'You're nicked!': Television police series and the fictional representation of law and order | 232 |
10 | You've never had it so silly: The politics of British satirical comedy from Beyond the Fringe to Spitting Image | 254 |
11 | A 'divine gift to inspire'?: Popular cultural representation, nationhood and the British monarchy | 285 |
12 | Shock waves: The authoritative response to popular music | 302 |
13 | Digging for Britain: An excavation in seven parts | 325 |
Index | 378 |