Rethinking Popular Culture

Rethinking Popular Culture selects some of the best and most important recent work analyzing popular culture. Drawing upon recent developments in cultural theory and the exciting new techniques of critical analysis, the essays in this volume break down disciplinary boundaries in a fresh and innovative fashion.

Eclectic and wide-ranging, Rethinking Popular Culture includes works by authors in the humanities and social sciences. The essays touch on a variety of features of popular culture, from photography to fashion, romance novels to television, jokes to food habits.

The editors' comprehensive introduction sets each essay in the context of intellectual developments in history, sociology, literature, and anthropology and in the study of popular culture as a whole. Arguing that recent scholarship has revolutionized our understanding of popular culture, the editors articulate what that new perspective is while introducing some of the most influential and important work that gave rise to it.

Chandra Mukerji is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of San Diego. Michael Schudson is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

Rethinking Popular Culture, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson
Printing and the People, Natalie Zemon Davis
Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin, Robert Darnton
The Rise of the Saloon, Roy Rosenzweig
William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation, Lawrence W. Levine
The Dream World of Mass Consumption, Rosalind Williams
Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, Clifford Geertz
La Pensée Bourgeoise, Marshall Sahlins
Jokes, Mary Douglas
Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems, Paul Hirsch
Movies of the Week, Todd Gitlin
Sport and Social Class, Pierre Bourdieu
Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America, Paul DiMaggio
The Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas
Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, Raymond Williams
The Suit and the Photograph, John Berger
Written Clothing, Roland Barthes
What Is an Author? Michel Foucault
Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading, Janice Radway