Décio Torres Cruz approaches connections between literature and cinema partly through issues of gender and identity, and partly through issues of reality and representation. In doing so, he looks at the various ways in which people have thought of the so-called cinematic novel, tracing the development of that genre concept not only in the French ciné-roman and film scenarios but also in novels from the United States, England, France, and Latin America. The main tendency he identifies is the blending of the cinematic novel with pop literature, through allusions to Pop Art and other postmodern cultural trends. His prime exhibits are a number of novels by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; Heartbreak Tango; The Buenos Aires Affair; Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Pubis angelical. Bringing in suggestive sociocultural and psychoanalytical considerations, Cruz shows how, in Puig’s hands, the cinematic novel resulted in a pop collage of different texts, films, discourses, and narrative devices which fused reality and imagination into dream and desire.

Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture is the first major study to focus on American cultural history from the vampire’s point of view. Beginning in 1968, Ní Fhlainn argues that vampires move from the margins to the centre of popular culture as representatives of the anxieties and aspirations of their age. Mapping their literary and screen evolution on to the American Presidency, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this essential critical study chronicles the vampire’s blood-ties to distinct socio-political movements and cultural decades in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through case studies of key texts, including Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys, Blade, Twilight, Let Me In, True Blood and numerous adaptations of Dracula, this book reveals how vampires continue to be exemplary barometers of political and historical change in the American imagination. It is essential reading for scholars and students in Gothic and Horror Studies, Film Studies, and American Studies, and for anyone interested in the articulate undead.

Discussions of the phenomenon of postmodernism have established certain characteristics that are typical of postmodernist culture. This book presents a brief summary of the characteristics that have typically been associated with postmodernism, especially as they pertain to film.

Hot new West Coast voice on the Cultural Studies scene

Despite the theories about the “death of tragedy”, this book explores fragments and reflections of tragedy in postmodern film. Tragedy has changed and evolved with human society, and its continuous chain from Ancient Greece to modern times has been broken by postmodernism. However, certain aspects of tragedy have continued to be used by literature and film: in particular, films with themes of chaos, violence, popular culture, paranoia, virtual reality and alienation often use aspects of tragedy. The focus of this study is on these facets adopted by postmodern film.

A monograph analysing the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life.

Avant-Pop is innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics, and various unclassifiable texts written by the most radical, subversive literary talents of the postmodern new wave. They include cult figures in the pop underground (Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Tim Ferret, Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe), important new writers who have gained prominence since the late eighties (Mark Leyner, Eurudice, William T. Vollmann), and the most promising new kids on the block ("rap fiction" master Ricardo Cortez Cruz--winner of the 1992 Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction--and Doug Rice, whose obscenely obsessive, Faulkner-meets-Acker prose is showcased here for the first time). Avant-Pop will send a collective wake-up call to all those readers who have spent the last decade nodding off, along with the rest of America's daydream nation. Avant-Pop will actually reverse the numbing effects of years of exposure to the harmful emissions of television, movies, glossy magazines, and commercial bestsellers. Readers who decry the absence of a liberating radicalized art and have had it with our bland B-movie society of the spectacle will hop with the hip in Avant-Pop.

The scholarly essays in this book open up experimental and novel spaces and genres beyond the traditional and the literary world of Indian Popular Fiction as it existed towards the end of the last millennium. They respond to the possibilities opened up by the technology-driven and internet-savvy reading and writing world of today. Contemporaneous and bold, most of the essays resonate with the racy and fast-paced milieu and social media space inhabited by today's youth. Combative in its drift, this book makes possible an attempt to disband hierarchies and dismantle categories that have engulfed the expansive landscape of Indian Popular Fiction for too long. It facilitates discussion on graphic novels, microfiction, popular-entertainment and political satire on television and celluloid, social media-driven romances existing in the domain of the 'real' rather than that of 'fantasy' and mythological readings against the backdrop of gender and politics. Aimed at facilitating further research by scholars and enthusiasts of Indian Popular Fiction, this book is also an ode to the current trends generated by social and internet media cosmos. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The book deals with film, television, information technology, consumer products and popular literature, and assesses challenges to conceptions of the postmodern based on gender, race and religion.

An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture is widely recognized as an immensely useful textbook for students taking courses in the major theories of popular culture. Strinati provides a critical assessment of the ways in which these theories have tried to understand and evaluate popular culture in modern societies. Among the theories and ideas the book introduces are: mann culture, the Frankfurt School and the culture industry, semiology and structuralism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and cultural populism. This new edition provides fresh material on Marxism and feminism, while a new final chapter assesses the significance of the theories explained in the book.