The popularity of cable news, satire, documentaries, and political blogs suggest that people are often absorbing and dissecting direct political messages from informational media. But entertainment media also discusses the important political issues of our time, though not as overtly. Nonetheless, consumers still learn, debate, and form opinions on important political issues through their relationship with entertainment media. While many scholarly books examine these political messages found in popular culture, very few examine how actual audiences read these messages. Parasocial Politics...

"My dear Klare, I promised you something more detailed about the true causes of the serious step in which you now see me engaged. I will tell you what is needful, that you may also be able to refute any other gossip; toward which, however, I am most indifferent myself. What for six years past has supported, comforted, and strengthened me withal to stay by Minna's side despite the enormous differences of our character and disposition, is the love of that young gentlewoman who at first and for long approached me shyly, diffidently, hesitant and timid, but thereafter more and more decidedly and...

The importance of the global rural-urban matrix is often overlooked due to urban-normativity. But sometimes agrarian populism and a pastoral rural imaginary result in the equally fallacy of a rural-normativity, as in Jeffersonian nostalgia for a lost way of life that never existed. The nature of rurality in North America is important to study, but as Alessandro Bonanno makes clear, we cannot limit ourselves to the study of one or two nation-states. We must take a global perspective when it comes to the bio-physical environment and the nature of the world capitalist system. This collection...