Love is a dominant theme in Western popular culture. It has become central to the meaning of everyday life, propagated through the media and the market. Being in love has become idealized. With the demise of institutional religion in the West, love has become the dominant form of inner-worldly salvation. In Foucault s terms, it has become a key component in the arts of existence and the care of self: to have lived without loving is sinful.

In this highly accessible introduction to love of all kinds, Tom Inglis gives a clear, concise picture of how love shapes, and is shaped by, society....

This text explores the recent transformation of zombie from cult genre to a figure that pervades western culture. Rutherford explores why this figure has gathered such momentum in the last decade and asks why the stock zombie scenarios of ghouls tearing bodies to pieces, of survivors bludgeoning their zombie loved ones, and of civilisation in ruins hold such fascination for contemporary audiences.

Impending environmental catastrophe, threat of terrorism, viruses both biological and virtual, disease: there seem to be so many reasons to panic today. But what is panic and why does it happen? This book uses a range of literature from sociology, cultural studies and popular psychology to develop an original analysis of panic in contemporary social life. Bringing together academic literature from a range of disciplines, films, novels and current affairs, it encourages thought about why and how we panic - both individually and collectively. Keith Tester explores how cataclysmic events and...