The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade, edited by Kimberly R. Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell, is a holistic analysis of the decade that focuses on major turning points and developments in literature, entertainment, politics, and social experimentation. This analysis ultimately presents the 1980s as a significant phenomenon in the American landscape. The 1980s is a groundbreaking and stand-alone introductory volume that is unapologetically interdisciplinary in nature and encourages students to explore topics of the decade often overlooked or grouped together with other, more memorable decades such as the 1920s or 1960s.

"A new book of essays by the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin"--

American art of the 1980s is as misunderstood as it is notorious. Critics of the time feared that market hype and self-promotion threatened the integrity of art. They lashed out at contemporary art, questioning the validity of particular media and methods and dividing the art into opposing camps. While controversies have since subsided, critics still view art of the 1980s as a stylistic battlefield. Alison Pearlman rejects this picture, which is truer of the period's criticism than of its art. Pearlman reassesses the works and careers of six artists who became critics' biggest targets. In each of three chapters, she pairs two artists the critics viewed as emblematic of a given trend: Julian Schnabel and David Salle in association with Neo-Expressionism; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring vis-à-vis Graffiti Art; and Peter Halley and Jeff Koons in relation to Simulationism. Pearlman shows how all these artists shared important but unrecognized influences and approaches: a crucial and overwhelming inheritance of 1960s and 1970s Conceptualism, a Warholian understanding of public identity, and a deliberate and nuanced use of past styles and media. Through in-depth discussions of works, from Haring's body-paintings of Grace Jones to Schnabel's movie Basquiat, Pearlman demonstrates how these artists' interests exemplified a broader, generational shift unrecognized by critics. She sees this shift as starting not in the 1980s but in the mid-1970s, when key developments in artistic style, art-world structures, and consumer culture converged to radically alter the course of American art. Unpackaging Art of the 1980s offers an innovative approach to one of the most significant yet least understood episodes in twentieth-century art.

Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Art Spiegelman, eclipsing the work of others who also played a key role in shaping comics as we know them today. The Other 1980s offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this robust era of ambitious comics publishing. The twenty essays in The Other 1980s illuminate many works hailed as innovative in their day that have nonetheless fallen from critical view, partly because they challenge the contours of conventional comics studies scholarship: open-ended serials that eschew the graphic-novel format beloved by literature departments; sprawling superhero narratives with no connection to corporate universes; offbeat and abandoned experiments by major publishers, including Marvel and DC; idiosyncratic and experimental independent comics; unusual genre exercises filtered through deeply personal sensibilities; and oft-neglected offshoots of the classic “underground” comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The collection also offers original examinations of the ways in which the fans and critics of the day engaged with creators and publishers, establishing the groundwork for much of the contemporary critical and academic discourse on comics. By uncovering creators and works long ignored by scholars, The Other 1980s revises standard histories of this major period and offers a more nuanced understanding of the context from which the iconic comics of the 1980s emerged.

This book looks beyond the common label of 'Ronald Reagan's America' to chart the complex intersection of cultures in the 1980s. In doing so it provides an insightful account of the major cultural forms of 1980s America - literature and drama; film and television; music and performance; art and photography - and influential texts and trends of the decade: from White Noise to Wall Street, from Silicon Valley to MTV, and from Madonna to Cindy Sherman. A focused chapter considers the changing dynamics of American culture in an increasingly globalised marketplace.

In this concise yet thorough history of America in the 1980s, Doug Rossinow takes the full measure of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the ideology of Reaganism. Believers in libertarian economics and a muscular foreign policy, Reaganite conservatives in the 1980s achieved impressive success in their efforts to transform American government, politics, and society, ushering in the political and social system Americans inhabit today. Rossinow links current trends in economic inequality to the policies and social developments of the Reagan era. He reckons with the racial politics of Reaganism and its debt to the backlash generated by the civil rights movement, as well as Reaganism's entanglement with the politics of crime and the rise of mass incarceration. Rossinow narrates the conflicts that rocked U.S. foreign policy toward Central America, and he explains the role of the recession during the early 1980s in the decline of manufacturing and the growth of a service economy. From the widening gender gap to the triumph of yuppies and rap music, from Reagan's tax cuts and military buildup to the celebrity of Michael Jackson and Madonna, from the era's Wall Street scandals to the successes of Bill Gates and Sam Walton, from the first "war on terror" to the end of the Cold War and the brink of America's first war with Iraq, this history, lively and readable yet sober and unsparing, gives readers vital perspective on a decade that dramatically altered the American landscape.

This book intends to trace the revival of traditional literary works since the 1980s in China as it is revealed on the revitalized College Entrance Examination (CEE). In order to show how these changes reflect China’s altering ideology after the fall of Communism, selections from the CEE’s literary portion will be examined. Taking advantage of the resurrection of the powerful CEE, test creators have composed the literary portion as an education tool to shape public opinion in the post-Communist era. Literature in China have never been an independent art but had shared the responsibility for transmitting China’s intellectual and ethical traditions. The introduction of Communism to China silenced these traditions and made literature the servant of political ideology. This book traces the chronological process of restoring modern vernacular literature from the pre-Communist era and the ways in which traditional literature is being used for modern purposes. For many Chinese intellectuals, the gradual withdrawal of literature for serving political causes and the reinstatement of classical literature and early vernacular works to on the CEE bring to light the recovery of the aesthetic literary tradition and a return to normalcy. When students take the CEE, they not only mentally scrutinize literature that they first read during their secondary education, but also experience an assertive presentation of current Chinese cultural values and outlooks on life. This study argues that in the post-1980s CEE literary selections, students experience a variety of texts that summon up China’s pre-Communist literary tradition in order to serve as an intellectual guiding light for future social development. For those interested in comparative higher education, a particular area of interest may be the book’s singular consideration of the science and technology passages in connection with the restructuring of higher education in China as a remedy of China’s cultural tradition.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology. “Tremendously funny . . . A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.”—The New Republic The inspiration for the award-winning major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in “American magic and dread.” Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an “airborne toxic event” unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).