This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai's famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

About the Author

Anna Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL), University of Silesia, Poland. Her research interests embrace critical theory, popular culture, material culture and love studies. She is particularly interested in the formation of social and cultural norms and social-aesthetic codes of cultural production

Karolina Lebek is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL), University of Silesia, Poland. She specializes in early modern studies, specifically in the study of objects as well as material cultures, i. e. theorizing and representing things in cultural and literary practices.

Reviews

"Conceptually eclectic and empirically wide-ranging, this book provides an expansive and sophisticated exploration of the complex, shifting and emergent relations between the material and the popular." -Mike Michael, University of Sydney, Australia

"Approaching the growing research field of material and popular culture from a range of perspectives and through many relevant and up-to-date case studies, this anthology adds to our understanding of the materiality of our everyday encounters with the popular." - Karin Fast, Karlstad University, Sweden

Book Information
ISBN 9780367878177
Author Anna Malinowska
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g