History & Criticism

What becomes of life, experience, and truth in the hyperconsumeristic culture of the twenty-first century? What happens to the phenomenological call to go "back to the things themselves" when these things, to an ever greater degree, involve a...

In Television Cities Charlotte Brunsdon traces television's representations of metropolitan spaces to show how they reflect the medium's history and evolution, thereby challenging the prevalent assumptions about television as quintessentially suburban...

Yoga gurus on lifestyle cable channels targeting time-pressured Indian urbanites; Chinese dating shows promoting competitive individualism; Taiwanese domestic makeover formats combining feng shui with life planning advice: Asian TV screens are...

In Television as Digital Media, scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States combine television studies with new media studies to analyze digital TV as part of digital culture. Taking into account technologies, industries,...

Critics often claim that prime-time television seemed immune-or even willfully blind-to the landmark upheavals rocking American society during the 1960s. Groove Tube is Aniko Bodroghkozy's rebuttal of this claim. Filled with entertaining and enlightening...

In less than a century, the flickering blue-gray light of the television screen has become a cultural icon. What do the images transmitted by that screen tell us about power, authority, gender stereotypes, and ideology in the United States? Television,...

How did a new, irresistible brand of television emerge from the Lebanese Civil War (1975-91) to conquer the Arab region in the satellite era? What role did seductive news anchors, cool language teachers, superheroes, and gossip magazines play in...

Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000-2007). Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated...

Cable television, on the brink of a boom in the 1970s, promised audiences a new media frontier-an expansive new variety of entertainment and information choices. Music video, 24-hour news, 24-hour weather, movie channels, children's channels, home...

The Apprentice. Project Runway. The Bachelor. My Life on the D-list. Extreme Makeover. American Idol. It is virtually impossible to turn on a television without coming across some sort of reality programming. Yet, while this genre has rapidly moved from...

Nickelodeon is the highest rated daytime channel in the country, and its cultural influence has grown at an astounding pace. Why are Nickelodeon shows so popular? How are they developed and marketed? And where do they fit in the economic picture of the...

Satirical TV has become mandatory viewing for citizens wishing to make sense of the bizarre contemporary state of political life. Shifts in industry economics and audience tastes have re-made television comedy, once considered a wasteland of escapist...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814348208Author Will ScheibelFormat HardbackPage Count 280Imprint Wayne State University PressPublisher Wayne State University PressWeight(grams) 152g

Robin Nelson's State of play up-dates and develops the arguments of his influential TV Drama In Transition (1997). It is equally distinctive in setting analusis of the aesethetics and compositional principles of texts within a broad conceptual framework...

Gone with the Wind an inspiration for the American avant-garde? Mickey Mouse a crucial source for the development of cutting-edge intellectual and aesthetic ideas? As Greg Taylor shows in this witty and provocative book, the idea is not so far-fetched...

From 9/11 to COVID-19, the twenty-first century looks increasingly dystopian-and so do its television shows. Long-form science fiction narratives take one step further the fears of today: liberal democracy in crisis, growing economic precarity, the...

Alan Schroeder's big-picture history recounts the phenomenon of American televised presidential debates and its evolution over the past half century. From pundits to political operatives, from debate moderators to the viewing public, Presidential Debates...

Alan Schroeder's popular history now covers the 2000 Bush-Gore and 2004 Bush-Kerry debates, including innovations in format and press coverage, and adds new research on televised debates since 1960. Schroeder organizes his book according to a television...

What is meant by an 'independent' television and press, and what affirmative role should any government have in the regulation of television? How do competing interest groups use media regulation to their advantage? What impact does television have on...

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by...

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by...

Between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows,...

Using rhetorical criticism as a research method, Public Memory, Relational Dialectics, and the TV Series Outlander examines how public memory is created in the first four seasons of the popular television show Outlander. In this book, Valerie Lynn...

This text offers exploration, based on case studies, of television's complex formative period - the 1950s. It discusses television's role in the construction of national and gender identities and its relation to other media such as theatre, film and...

Mothers on American television takes an in-depth look at how motherhood is represented on some of the most popular television series produced this century. Adopting a feminist, Marxist, cultural studies and psychoanalytical approach, the book offers a...

During the course of its three seasons, Veronica Mars captured the attention of fans and academics alike. The 12 scholarly essays in this collection examine the show's most compelling elements. Topics covered include vintage television, the search for...

Following her success with Playboy Swings , Patty Farmer looks at Playboy's relationship with comedians and cartoonists in her new book Playboy Laughs . Playboy Laughs invites readers onto the sets of the organization's groundbreaking TV shows, ...

In late-sixteenth-century London, the commercial theaters undertook a novel experiment, fueling a fashion for plays that trafficked in the contemporary urban scene. But beyond the stage's representing the everyday activities of the expanding metropolis,...

This collection is the first to offer a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue, a ten-film cycle of modern tales that touch on the ethical dilemmas of the Ten Commandments. The cycle's deft handling of moral ambiguity...

The birth and development of commercial television in Cuba in the 1950s occurred alongside political and social turmoil. In this period of dramatic swings encompassing democracy, a coup, a dictatorship, and a revolution, television functioned as a beacon...

During the latter half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, television talk shows, infotainment news, and screaming supermarket headlines became ubiquitous in America as the "tabloidization" of the nation's media took hold. In Tabloid Culture...

Since the show's debut in 2007, Mad Men has invited viewers to immerse themselves in the lush period settings, ruthless Madison Avenue advertising culture, and arresting characters at the center of its 1960s fictional world. Mad Men, Mad World is a...

The popularity of television in postwar suburban America had a devastating effect on the traditional Hollywood studio system. Yet many aging Hollywood stars used television to revive their fading careers. In Recycled Stars, Mary R. Desjardins examines...

In Screening Culture, Viewing Politics Purnima Mankekar presents a cutting-edge ethnography of television-viewing in India. With a focus on the responses of upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serials,...

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use...

In an age when geek chic has come to define mainstream pop culture, few writers and producers inspire more admiration and response than Joss Whedon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Much Ado about Nothing, from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog to The...

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times once noted that "I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day." That Lucy's madcap antics can be watched anywhere at any time is thanks to television syndication, a booming...

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times once noted that "I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day." That Lucy's madcap antics can be watched anywhere at any time is thanks to television syndication, a booming...

Survivor. The Bachelor. Extreme Makeover. Big Brother. Joe Millionaire. American Idol. The Osbournes. It is virtually impossible to turn on a television without coming across some sort of reality programming. Yet, while this genre has rapidly moved from...

Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award The Midwest of popular imagination is a "Heartland" characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively...