Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Popular culture
        July 2012

        The arc and the machine

        Narrative and new media

        by Caroline Bassett

        The Arc and the machine is a timely and original defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation it convincingly argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, it insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. The book offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a sophisticated critique of techno-cultural writing, and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical - rather than celebratory approaches - to new media. The scope and range of this book is broad, its argumentation careful and exacting, and its conclusions exciting.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2007

        The child at risk

        paedophiles, media responses and public opinion

        by Anneke Meyer, Chantal Hamil

        Paedophilia continues to be a public and emotive topic in contemporary Britain which is capable of generating great and varying levels of interest, concern and condemnation. The child at risk charts these social responses and unravels their underlying dynamics through detailed empirical research and theoretical analysis. Anneke Meyer looks beyond the media and 'moral panics' for explanations of emotive social responses and the paradox pervading them (the paradox of increased regulation, of paedophiles and children, coinciding with continuing popular concern). Drawing on and developing a wide range of theoretical frameworks, the book identifies a number of dynamics which produce concern and renders regulation designed to reduce fears ineffective. These dynamics include the moral rhetoric of childhood and the exposition of the crisis of neo-liberalism and conceptualisations of 'the paedophile' as a dangerous pervert. As a result the book points beyond its immediate subject and furthers understanding in the areas of risk, childhood and governance, as well as collective concerns and emotions. It will be essential reading in sociology, media studies and for those interested in media representation and governance. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2007

        Public issue television

        World in Action' 1963–98

        by Peter Goddard, John Corner, Kay Richardson

        Public issue television is a major contribution to understanding the relationship between television, politics and society. Based on full access to the archives, it offers a fascinating historical account of how one television series, Granada's World in Action, celebrated for its tough journalism, visual directness and public impact, functioned and developed over its run across 35 years between 1963 and 1998. In a succession of chapters looking at different periods in the series' development and at key dimensions of its distinctive identity, it gets deep inside the making of factual television and examines how a particular culture of production works within broader conditions of possibility and constraint. In particular, it charts the interwoven processes of change - technological, professional, aesthetic, institutional, economic, social and political. As well as discussing achievement and success, it examines the tensions, the debates and open conflicts that formed part of the context within which the series was made and transmitted across four decades. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2016

        Players' work time

        A history of the British Musicians' Union, 1893–2013

        by Martin Cloonan, John Williamson

        This is about musicians' working lives in Britain from the late Victorian era to the present day. Using the Musicians' Union as a prism through which to explore those lives, the book illuminates the key factors which shape musicians' working lives including such things as changes in technology, law and the music industries, while also considering matters of nationality, gender and genre. Anyone interested in music and the people who make it will be interested in this history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2016

        Players' work time

        A history of the British Musicians' Union, 1893–2013

        by Martin Cloonan, John Williamson

        This is about musicians' working lives in Britain from the late Victorian era to the present day. Using the Musicians' Union as a prism through which to explore those lives, the book illuminates the key factors which shape musicians' working lives including such things as changes in technology, law and the music industries, while also considering matters of nationality, gender and genre. Anyone interested in music and the people who make it will be interested in this history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Popular culture
        July 2015

        Experimental British television

        by Martin Hargreaves

        Throughout its history, British television has found a place, if only in its margins, for programmes that consciously worked to expand the boundaries of television aesthetics. Even in the present climate of increased academic interest in television history, its experimental tradition has generally either been approached generically or been lost within the assumption that television is simply a mass medium. Avaible for the first time in paperback, Experimental British television uncovers the history of experimental television, bringing back forgotten programmes in addition to looking at relatively more privileged artists or programme strands from fresh perspectives. The book therefore goes against the grain of dominant television studies, which tends to place the medium within the flow of the 'everyday', in order to scrutinise those productions that attempted to make more serious interventions within the medium.

      • Trusted Partner
        Computing & IT
        September 2017

        Games are not

        The difficult and definitive guide to what games are

        by David Myers

        How do we reconcile a videogame industry's insistence that games positively affect human beliefs and behaviors with the equally prevalent assumption that games are "just games"? How do we reconcile accusations that games make us violent and antisocial and unproductive with the realization that games are a universal source of human joy? In Game are not, David Myers demonstrates that these controversies and conflicts surrounding the meanings and effects of games are not going away; they are essential properties of the game's paradoxical aesthetic form. Games are not focuses on games writ large, bound by neither digital form nor by cultural interpretation. Interdisciplinary in scope and radical in conclusion, Games are not positions games as unique objects evoking a peculiar and paradoxical liminal state - a lusory attitude - that is essential to human creativity, knowledge, and sustenance of the species.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2018

        The playboy and James Bond

        007, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine

        by Claire Hines

        This is the first book to focus on James Bond's relationship to the playboy ideal through the sixties and beyond. Examining aspects of the Bond phenomenon and the playboy lifestyle, it considers how ideas of gender and consumption were manipulated to construct and reflect a powerful male fantasy in the post-war era. This analysis of the close association and relations between the emerging cultural icons of James Bond and the playboy is particularly concerned with Sean Connery's definitive Bond as he was promoted and used by the media. By exploring the connections that developed between Bond and Playboy magazine within a historical framework, the book offers new insights into these related phenomena and their enduring legacy in popular culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2018

        The playboy and James Bond

        007, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine

        by Claire Hines

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2018

        The playboy and James Bond

        007, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine

        by Claire Hines

      • Trusted Partner
        Popular culture
        July 2013

        The naval war film

        Genre, history and national cinema

        by Jonathan Rayner

        This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

      • Trusted Partner
        Popular culture
        July 2013

        The naval war film

        Genre, history and national cinema

        by Jonathan Rayner

        This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

      • Trusted Partner
        Popular culture
        July 2012

        The naval war film

        Genre, history and national cinema

        by Jonathan Rayner

        This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

      • Trusted Partner
        Popular culture
        May 2013

        Imagining the popular in contemporary French culture

        by Edited by Diana Holmes and David Looseley

        This groundbreaking book is about what 'popular culture' means in France, and how the term's shifting meanings have been negotiated and contested. It represents the first theoretically informed study of the way that popular culture is lived, imagined, fought over and negotiated in modern and contemporary France. It covers a wide range of overarching concerns: the roles of state policy, the market, political ideologies, changing social contexts and new technologies in the construction of the popular. But it also provides a set of specific case studies showing how popular songs, stories, films, TV programmes and language styles have become indispensable elements of 'culture' in France. Deploying yet also rethinking a 'Cultural Studies' approach to the popular, the book therefore challenges dominant views of what French culture really means today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Music
        September 2016

        Players' work time

        A history of the British Musicians' Union, 1893–2013

        by Martin Cloonan, John Callan Williamson

        This book examines the working lives of musicians over the past 120 years via the history of the Musicians' Union. The union has been at the centre of all major agreements covering the employment of musicians across the UK's music industries for this period and its role to date has largely been ignored by historians of the music profession, the music industries and trade unions. This book remedies that oversight, providing fresh insight to musicians' working lives, the industries in which they work and wider British social life. It explores a history of confrontation, coercion and compromise played out across the nation's studios, performance spaces and airwaves.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2012

        Imagining the popular in contemporary French culture

        by Diana Holmes, David Looseley

        This groundbreaking book is about what 'popular culture' means in France, and how the term's shifting meanings have been negotiated and contested. It represents the first theoretically informed study of the way that popular culture is lived, imagined, fought over and negotiated in modern and contemporary France. It covers a wide range of overarching concerns: the roles of state policy, the market, political ideologies, changing social contexts and new technologies in the construction of the popular. But it also provides a set of specific case studies showing how popular songs, stories, films, TV programmes and language styles have become indispensable elements of 'culture' in France. Deploying yet also rethinking a 'Cultural Studies' approach to the popular, the book therefore challenges dominant views of what French culture really means today. ;

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