Since its first appearance as a series of cartoon vignettes in 1987 and its debut as a weekly program in 1990, The Simpsons has had multiple, even contradictory, media identities. Although the show has featured biting political and social satire, which often proves fatal to mass public acceptance, The Simpsons entered fully into the mainstream, consistently earning high ratings from audiences and critics alike.

Leaving Springfield addresses the success of The Simpsons as a corporate-manufactured show that openly and self-reflexively parodies the very consumer capitalism it...

This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular romantic comedies by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in these films. Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within romantic...

This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular romantic comedies by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in these films. Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within romantic...

Screen Ages is a valuable guide for students exploring the complex and vibrant history of US cinema and showing how this film culture has grown, changed and developed.

Covering key periods from across American cinema history, John Alberti explores the social, technological and political forces that have shaped cinematic output and the varied impacts cinema of on US society.

Each chapter has a series of illuminating key features, including:

• Now Playing, focusing on films as cinematic events, from "The Birth of a Nation" to "Gone with the Wind" to "Titanic, "to place the...

Screen Ages is a valuable guide for students exploring the complex and vibrant history of US cinema and showing how this film culture has grown, changed and developed.

Covering key periods from across American cinema history, John Alberti explores the social, technological and political forces that have shaped cinematic output and the varied impacts cinema of on US society.

Each chapter has a series of illuminating key features, including:

• Now Playing, focusing on films as cinematic events, from "The Birth of a Nation" to "Gone with the Wind" to "Titanic, "to place the...

Although it lasted only four seasons and just forty-four episodes, The Killing attracted considerable critical notice and sparked an equally lively debate about its distinctive style and innovative approach to the television staple of the police procedural. A product of the turn toward revisionist "quality" television in the post-broadcast era, The Killing also stands as a pioneering example of the changing gender dynamics of early twenty-first-century television. Author John Alberti looks at how the show's focus shifts the police procedural away from the idea that...

Transforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Ageis an edited volume of eight essays that look at how the cinematic versions of the seven Harry Potter novels represent an unprecedented cultural event in the history of cinematic adaptation. The movie version of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, premiered in 2001, in between publication of the fourth and fifth books of this global literary phenomenon. As a result, the production and reception of both novel and movie series became intertwined with one another,...

Transforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Ageis an edited volume of eight essays that look at how the cinematic versions of the seven Harry Potter novels represent an unprecedented cultural event in the history of cinematic adaptation. The movie version of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, premiered in 2001, in between publication of the fourth and fifth books of this global literary phenomenon. As a result, the production and reception of both novel and movie series became intertwined with one another,...