The musical has been called the most popular form of entertainment in the world. This work examines the subjects, themes, and contemporary relevance of Hollywood musicals through their long popularity, placing each show in historical and political context and analyzing it in detail. Cheer (1934) deal with the economic crises of the Depressions. Another addresses race issues by examining the prevalence of blackface minstrelsy in the 1930s and 1940s, looking at productions like Swing Time (1936) and Dixie (1943). Rock and roll culture, which started in the 1950s and threatened America with...

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author's text recognizes, references, alludes to, or otherwise elicits an audience member's familiarity with other texts. This work ranges from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfield.

For more than 150 years readers have interpreted Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction in a dazzling variety of ways. Instead of arguing in favor of or against what these readers conceive the fiction to mean, this examination of Hawthorne's narrative strategies demonstrates how he leads readers to reason as they do.

Throughout his career Hawthorne manipulated and experimented with all the elements of narrative discourse, creating texts that continue to cry out for, yet defy, interpretation. In The Marble Faun. just as in his earliest tales and sketches, Hawthorne varies pronouns and verb...

Since no other book has been written on this subject, Metapop blazes a trail into new territory. The author writes very clearly and gracefully and expresses what could be difficult critical concepts in concise and comprehensible prose free of jargon. He identifies a major characteristic of our culture and provides a definitive guide to the phenomenon. Metapop is his term for popular culture's reflection of itself in its genres. This -self-referentiality- is becoming a major characteristic of our popular culture, one in which genre is meta-physical mirror of itself.

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How could one company--General Motors--meet disaster on one continent and achieve explosive growth on another at the very same time?

While General Motors was hurtling towards bankruptcy in 2009, GM's subsidiary in China was setting new sales and profit records. This book reveals how extraordinary people, remarkable decisions and surprising breaks made triumph in China possible for General Motors. It also shows just how vulnerable that winning track record remains.

No small part of GM's success in China springs from its management of shifting business and political...

Since the publication of the edition of John Blund's Tractatus de anima by the British Academy in 1970 there has been widespread acceptance of the importance of this text for the history of thought. Blund (ca. 1175-1248) was probably one of the first commentators on the libri naturales at Paris before the prohibition of 1210, and later introduced them to Oxford. Indeed, apart from the prohibitions of 1210 and 1215, the De anima of Blund is the one text which sheds light on the first reception of Aristotle at Paris. The text was probably composed at Paris, before 1204.
Blund taught arts at...