Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture is John G. Cawelti's discussion of American popular culture and violence, from its precursors in Homer and Shakespeare to the Lone Ranger and Superman. Cawelti deciphers the overt sexuality, detached violence, and political intrigue embedded within Batman and .007. He analyzes the work of such famous pop-culture icons as Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and Andy Warhol, and looks at a range of films, from Psycho and Dances with Wolves, and literature, from The Waste Land to Catch 22.
Examples from popular movies,...

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans' conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today's resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social...

In a thoughtful, well-informed study exploring fiction from throughout Stephen King's immense oeuvre, Heidi Strengell shows how this popular writer enriches his unique brand of horror by building on the traditions of his literary heritage. Tapping into the wellsprings of the gothic to reveal contemporary phobias, King invokes the abnormal and repressed sexuality of the vampire, the hubris of Frankenstein, the split identity of the werewolf, the domestic melodrama of the ghost tale. Drawing on myths and fairy tales, he creates characters who, like the heroic Roland the Gunslinger and the...

For more than sixty years, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans personified the romantic, mythic West that Americans cherished. Blazing a trail through every branch of the entertainment industry-radio, film, recordings, television, and even comic books-the couple capitalized on their attractive personas and appealed to the nation's belief in family values, an independent spirit, and community. 
Raymond E. White presents these two celebrities in the most comprehensive and inclusive account to date. Part narrative, part reference, this impeccably researched, highly accessible survey spans the...

The histories of baseball and country music ran in parallel tracks through most of the twentieth century. America s sport and America s music moved from the fringes to the mainstream, gaining exposure and building heroes, first via radio broadcasts and then on the television screen. Both evolved with American society through wartime, the Civil Rights movement, and into the age of multimillion dollar superstars. Don Cusic offers an engaging and insightful analysis that addresses race, gender, class, ethnicity, business practices and marketing, performance, media, and the cult of celebrity."

In this fascinating book, Brian J. Frost presents the first full-scale survey of werewolf literature covering both fiction and nonfiction works. He identifies principal elements in the werewolf myth, considers various theories of the phenomenon of shapeshifting, surveys nonfiction books, and traces the myth from its origins in ancient superstitions to its modern representations in fantasy and horror fiction.
Frost's analysis encompasses fanciful medieval beliefs, popular works by Victorian authors, scholarly treatises and medical papers, and short stories from pulp magazines of the 1930s...

From Hank Williams to hip hop, Aunt Jemima to the Energizer Bunny, scrap-booking to NASCAR racing, Profiles of Popular Culture cuts a generous swath across what is perhaps the fastest growing discipline of the past several decades. Edited by a pioneer in the field, this volume invites readers to reflect on a diverse sampling of modern myths, icons, archetypes, rituals, and pastimes. Adopting an inclusive approach, editor Ray B. Browne has mined both scholarly and mainstream media to bring together penetrating essays on fads and fashions, sports fandom, the shaping of body image,...

Since its birth in the 1960s, the study of popular culture has come a long way in defining its object, its purpose, and its place in academe. Emerging along the margins of a scholarly establishment that initially dismissed anything popular as unworthy of serious study-trivial, formulaic, easily digestible, escapist-early practitioners of the discipline stubbornly set about creating the theoretical and methodological framework upon which a deeper understanding could be founded. Through seminal essays that document the maturation of the field as it gradually made headway toward legitimacy,...