San Antonio College Library

"Understanding Theology and Popular Culture" is one of the first books to give an overview of the key issues and methods in this field of study. This title provides a detailed introduction to key theories and debates in popular cultural studies. It presents a reasoned argument about the distinctive contribution that theology can make to the study of popular culture. It is illustrated through a range of original case studies, from Eminem to The Simpsons....

Entertainers, sex objects, or athletes? Leaders, porn stars, or superstars? Cheerleaders, numbering 3.8 million in the United States alone, are part of everyone's school experiences and memories. Looking beyond the poms and megaphones, this book explores how cheerleading reflects our shifting beliefs about sports, entertainment, gender, and national identity.

"Inventing Popular Culture is a lively and accessible history of the idea of popular culture by one of the leading experts in the field. Written from the critical perspective of cultural studies, the book traces the invention and reinvention of the concept of popular culture from the eighteenth-century "discovery" of folk culture to contemporary accounts of the cultural impact of globalization."--Jacket.

"Jack Santino's analysis encompasses everything from movies to romance novels, from television shows to comic books. One especially fascinating feature of this study is its examination of the packaged-foods industry and the manner in which soft drinks, beer, snack cakes, cookies, candy, and breakfast cereals are regularly repackaged to reflect particular holidays. In what becomes a central theme of the book, Santino shows how holidays give companies...

From the proliferation of novels written by white women in the late eighteenth century to the rise of rap music composed by black men in the late twentieth, popular culture has been a powerful force in the United States, resonating within the society as a while and at the same time connecting disparate and even hostile constituencies. In this fascinating history written for the general reader, Jim Cullen traces the development of this culture over...

"During the Golden age of comic books, from the middle 1930s to the late 1940s, readers could choose from hundreds of titles colorfully displayed on America's newsstands - from Action Comics to Zip Comics." "Selecting from thousands of cover illustrations of the period, comics authority Ron Goulart has assembled more than 400 of the most entertaining and provocative for this book." "You'll see images of various characters, including Superman, Batman,...

This work traces the development of country music and its institutionalization from Fiddlin' John Carson's pioneering recordings in Atlanta in 1923 to the posthumous success of Hank Williams.

"Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though computer games are essentially entertainment, they are in fact important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power." "In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who build, market, and play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative...

First ed. published under title: The image; or, What happened to the American dream. Includes index. Bibliography: p. 263-294.