This Major Work from Routledge s Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series is a four-volume set of key theoretical, empirical, and historical writings on journalism. Adopting a pluralist theoretical approach, the collection brings together the very best foundational and cutting-edge scholarship from the various disciplines that make up the field to comprise an internationally oriented reference work which contributes significantly to the social, economic, political, cultural, and practical understanding of journalism. The editorial scope of the collection is wide and inclusive...

Books are the cornerstone of our culture. They disseminate ideas, and preserve and transmit literature. Their contents underpin great religions, and have been responsible for wars and revolutions. They lie at the heart of education and scholarship. They have brought pleasure (and some pain) to countless millions of people for nearly three millennia.

The systematic study of books and the means by which they are created and distributed began in the eighteenth century, but it is only in the last 150 years or so that it has developed into an important field of scholarship. After...

Coinciding with the massive growth of consumerism after the Second World War, 'everyday life' has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly exploration. The critical study of quotidian routines, rules, spaces, and objects has become a central concern for scholars working in cultural studies. Furthermore, everyday life has also engaged the close attention of thinkers--including philosophers, cultural geographers, historians, and sociologists--from a range of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

As research in and around everyday life flourishes as never...

Over the last forty years or so academic interest in fashion has burgeoned, and, since the 1970s at least, attempts to define, analyse, and critically explain fashion phenomena have become vital areas of research and study in almost all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

As serious academic work on and around the theory and practice of fashion continues to flourish as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly...

Academic analysts and practitioner-theorists of advertising draw on rich and innovative multidisciplinary resources where cultural and media analysis meet economics, anthropology, semiotics, gender studies, social psychology, linguistics, and applied neuroscience. This new four-volume collection from Routledge s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. The collection connects researchers and advanced students to the best in...

Documentary film is cinema s oldest form, dating back to the medium s invention at the turn of twentieth century. From cinema s earliest days, important documentary films and film-makers have emerged continuously and, today, interest in documentary film remains substantial, and is rapidly growing. Standing conferences have been instituted, and new scholarly journals and festivals devoted to the genre are blossoming. Indeed, documentary film culture flourishes, particularly in the developing world and in non-democratic states. China s burgeoning underground documentary film movement, for...

Sound Studies is the primary theoretical and empirical alternative to our understanding of media and culture by visual means. The field is now well established as a serious area of research and study. Concentrating on the history of audio media, Sound Studies explores the nature of sound and listening, and its role in modern experience and perception. Furthermore, the subdiscipline questions the adequacy of previous--visually based--epistemologies of media and culture to offer a comprehensive understanding and interpretation of central facets of everyday life, historically, comparatively...

Chinese cinema is the only non-English language cinema to have a significant global presence. From multiplex blockbusters like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to festival hits such as Jia Zhangke's Still Life, Chinese cinema succeeds like no other foreign-language cinema. The interdisciplinary field of Chinese Cinema Studies has boomed alongside these developments and, today, no Asian Studies, Chinese Studies, or Film and Media Studies programme is complete without courses that cover Chinese cinema, including the cinemas of the People's Republic of China, Hong...