Media Studies

See Also: Media Studies > Backlist; Film > Criticism, Theory & History.

Get Smashed. The Story of the Men Who Made the Adverts that Changed Our Lives
Sam Delaney
Between the 1960s and the 1980s some of the most influential men in the country spent most of the day in the pub and got paid more than the Prime Minister. They were responsible for transforming a lifeless advertising industry into something exciting and extravagant--they came up with the idea of selling lifestyles. Get Smashed is their story, a story of ambition, obsession and excess which illustrates how the ads that began reflecting British culture came to define it. Softcover, 214 pp. $34.95.

Dictionary of Media Studies
Nicholas Abercrombie & Brian Longhurst
This invaluable new dictionary will provide students of the subject not only with a succinct overview, but also with useful explanations of the many concepts and theories involved. It includes biographies of key figures and discussion of different media, from film and television to music, the internet and journalism. Softcover, 383 pp. $20.00.

The Flight of the Creative Class
Richard Florida
The creative class - skilled individuals ranging from money managers to makeup artists, software programmers to steadicam operators. These workers are in constant demand around the world. Florida argues that this demand means that the United States is truly in danger of losing its status as the world's greatest talent magnet. The Flight of the Creative Class explores this global competition to attract these skilled workers and shows how several key events have put the US at a substantial disadvantage just as smaller countries are doing everything in their power to attract these workers. Florida outlines the causes and potentially disastrous effects of this growing migration, and discusses ways in which the US can make itself more attractive to creative workers - ways that other countries may discover first. Softcover, 326 pp. $19.95.

The Myth of Media Violence: A Critical Introduction
David Trend
Written in an accessible style, The Myth of Media Violence explains the need for media violence, and why, despite decades of activism against them, violent media outlets continue to grow and develop at a rapid pace. Engaging examples are drawn from a range of media, including disaster and horror movies, science fiction, film tie-in toys, crime shows, MTV, news sports, and children's television programming, books, and video games. The book also investigates the forces encouraging social anxieties, why violence in media exists at all, and how society can deal with it. Softcover, 139 pp. $29.95.

Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film
Eric G. Wilson
Recent commercial Gnostic films are meditations on the conundrums of the post-modern age and the timeless soul. Eric Wilson's Secret Cinema establishes the theoretical foundations and implications of the genre of Gnostic cinema. The book discusses the functions of genre, the relationships between cinema and psychology, the connections between the moving image and sacred power, the role of the cinematographic apparatus, and the romance of film. It is attuned to material attractions of the movies, those gorgeous lights and lurid shadows, but also the film's spiritual invitations, the gaps between the pictures, the empty spaces at the heart of life. Softcover, 174 pp. $24.95.

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality
Elizabeth Ewen & Stuart Ewen
In this monumental work of popular history, Ewen & Ewen vividly expose the pivotal developments that have made stereotypes a persistent, common language. Moving across centuries and continents, their extraordinary journey uncovers the incubation of modern stereotypes in the halls of science and aesthetics and traces their materialization in the popular imagination. Their detective work in museum archives, popular magazines, and film alike, uncovers how stereotype has served as the groundwork of power in the modern world. Hardcover, 555 pp. $34.95.

Understanding Representation
Wendy Helsby
Understanding Representation has been co-authored by experienced Media and Film Studies tutors, offering fresh and innovative ways of talking about the key concept of representation. The choice of texts reflects both an attempt to push the boundaries of the study of representation with new research, but also to make it accessible and stimulating for students coming to this area for the first time. Case studies reflect contemporary concerns in the media, often from different perspectives. Softcover, 220 pp. $29.95.

Alternative and Activist Media
Mitzi Waltz
This study of alternative and activist media provides an introduction to alternative media theories, audiences and practices. It brings diverse voices and concepts from outside the commercial media world to the fore, enriching and challenging mass media. Illustrated with historical and current examples, from both a UK and international perspective, it also includes carefully constructed exercises and discussion topics based on case studies and available tests. Softcover, 149 pp. $28.95.

Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire
Ken Hillis, Michael Petit & Nathan Scott Epley
Everyday eBay is the first scholarly analysis of eBay that examines how the site has become a global, social, cultural, and economic phenomenon. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume approach eBay from a wide variety of perspectives, revealing how the auction site has become a bellwether of taste and material culture, a research tool, a nexus for the increasingly ubiquitous practice of selling and buying goods online, and a facilitator of global consumerism. Softcover, 313 pp. $31.95.

Mediated
Thomas DeZengotita
From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from hip-hop nation to climbing Mt. Everest, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated is a sophisticated and satirical tour of every department of our media-saturated society. Softcover, 291 pp. $18.95.

Computer Games: Text, Narrative, and Play
Various authors
This book provides a systematic, comprehensive introduction to the analysis of computer and video games. It introduces key concepts and approaches drawn from literary, film, games and media theory in an accessible and concrete manner; and it tests their use and relevance by applying them to a small but representative selection of Role Playing and action adventure games. It combines methods of textual analysis and audience research, showing how the combination of such methods can give a more complete picture of these playable texts and the fan culture they generate. Clearly written and engaging, it will be a key text for students in the field and for all those with an interest in taking games seriously. Softcover, 210 pp. $34.95.

On Michael Jackson
Margo Jefferson
Michael Jackson was once universally acclaimed as a song-and-dance man of genius; Wacko Jacko is now, more often than not, dismissed for his bizarre race and gender transformations and confounding antics. In On Michael Jackson -- an at once passionate, incisive, and bracing work of cultural analysis -- Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times Margo Jefferson brilliantly unravels the complexities of one of the most enigmatic figures of our time. Softcover, 146 pp. $27.00.

Media and Cultural Theory
James Curran & David Morley
Media & Cultural Theory brings together leading international scholars to address key issues and debates within media and cultural studies including: media representation on the new woman in contemporary society, the creation of self in lifestyle media, the nature of cultural globalisation, and the rise of digital actors and media. These subjects, and more, are analysed through the use of contemporary media and film texts, as well as case studies of the US and UK after 9/11. Softcover, 308 pp. $39.95.

News Around the World
Pamela J. Shoemaker & Akiba A. Cohen
What's news? A front-page news story in the United States might not appear in a newspaper in China. Or a minor story on German television may be all over the airwaves in India. Nevertheless News Around the World shows that the underlying nature of news is much the same the world over and that people -- no matter what their jobs or their status in society -- tend to hold similar notions of newsworthiness. This richly detailed study of the news, news makers and the audience, offers a global perspective, with profiles of ten different countries: Australia, Chile, China, Germany, India, Israel, Jordan, Russia, South America, and the United States. Softcover, 409 pp. $39.95.

Metaphysical Media: The Occult Experience in Popular Culture
Emily D. Edwards
Metaphysical Media focuses on the blurred definitions of topics associated with the occult as they are presented in popular culture to show moving-image media as devices that help structure an understanding of the supernatural world. Emily D. Edwards examines what media treatment of supernatural subjects and the very characteristics of the media themselves reveal about the persistence of the occult. She maintains that popular art has always had a close association with the paranormal or supernatural -- sometimes in illustration of an ideology, sometimes in ridicule of it, and sometimes as invocation itself. Softcover, 248 pp. $43.95.

Messages
Brian Winston
Messages is a search for the orgins of media forms, from print and stage through photography to film and broadcasting. With a wealth of illuminating anecdotes and quotations, Brian Winston clearly and forcefully argues, in accessible jargon-free language, the case for the media's central importance as an essential engine underpinning all human rights and driving the Western concept of the individual. Softcover, 430 pp. $35.95.

Race Against Time
Stephen Lewis
"I have spent the last four years watching people die." With these wrenching words, diplomat and humanitarian Stephen Lewis opens his 2005 Massey Lectures. Lewis's determination to bear witness to the desperate plight of so many in Africa and elsewhere is balanced by his unique, personal, and often searing insider's perspective on our ongoing failure to help. Lewis recounts how, in 2000, the United Nations Millenium Summit in New York introduced eight Millenium Development Goals, which focused on fundamental issues such as education, health, and cutting poverty in half by 2015. In audacious prose, alive with anecdotes ranging from maddening to hilarious and heartbreaking, Lewis shows why and how the international community is falling desperately short of these goals. In Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis probes the appalling gap between vision and current reality. But he also offers bracingly attainable solutions to help us avoid what will otherwise be a terrible stain on the record of human achievement in the twenty-first century. Softcover, 198 pp. $18.95.

From Lowbrow to Nobrow
Peter Swirski
From Lowbrow to Nobrow demolishes the argument that popular culture is the underside of civilization. In this innovative book, Peter Swirski goes beyond arguing that "high-brow" has been transformed to "low-brow": he demonstrates that nobrow art is the interactive factor between popular art and highbrow art. Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction. He then examines the aesthetics of "artertainment" in three "nobrow" novels, and sheds new light on the relationship between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics. Softcover, 224 pp. $22.95.

Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Roseanne Barr, and Britney Spears all typify class-passers -- those who claim different socioeconomic classes as their own. According to new rules of social standing in American Popular Culture, class is no longer defined by wealth, birth, or education. This fascinating book draws on dozens of examples from pop culture, from old movie classics and contemporary films, to print ads and cyberspace, to illustrate this new paradigm. Softcover, 137 pp. $43.95.

Media/Theory: Thinking About Media and Communications
Shaun Moores
Media/Theory is an accessible yet challenging guide to ways of thinking about media and communications in modern life. Shaun Moore connects the analysis of media and communications with key themes in contemporary social theory -- Time, Space, Relationships, Meanings, and Experiences. Drawing on ideas from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, Media/Theory makes a distinctive contribution towards rethinking the shape and direction of media studies today. Softcover, 212 pp. $35.95.

American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture
Ilana Nash
Teenage girls seem to have been discovered by American pop culture in the 1930s. From that time until the present day, they have appeared in books and films, comics and television, as the embodied fantasies and nightmares of youth, women, and sexual maturation. Looking at such figures as Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, Gidget, Buffy, and Britney Spears, American Sweethearts shows how popular culture has shaped our view of the adolescent girl as an individual who is simultaneously sexualized and infantilized. Softcover, 264 pp. $30.95.

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers
Leslie Savan
With dazzling wit and acuity, three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Leslie Savan dissects contemporary language to discover what our most popular idioms reveal about America today. Whether it's George Tenet convincing George W. Bush that finding WMD in Iraq would be a "slam dunk" or Microsoft telling you that its latest software is a "no-brainer," this bright, snappy language affects us all -- up close and personal. This marvelously original and informative book about the ever-changing American language will provide surprising insights into the way we talk. Hardcover, 340 pp. $33.95.

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Teaching Music Video
Pete Fraser
Music video is a popular and accessible topic. The videos are familiar to students, easy to get hold of and short. And because it is always changing, it makes an exciting and vibrant form to study and analyse, raising interesting questions about representations, media language, institutions and audiences. It also has considerable influence upon a range of other media and cultural artefacts globally. This teaching guide gives you what you need to approach the topic with your students. Softcover, 78 pp. $34.95.

Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values
Patricia Pisters & Wim Staat
Do contemporary movements of migration and the ever-increasing abundance of audiovisual media correspond to -- or even cause -- shifts in the definition of both the bourgeois nuclear family and the tribal extended family? In Shooting the Family, twelve authors investigate the transfigured role of the family in a transnational world in which intercultural values are negotiated through mass media like film and television. Softcover, 224 pp. $59.95.

Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture
Sherrie A. Inness
Buffy, Xena, Lara Croft, La Femme Nikita: the women of pop culture are center stage and tougher than ever. Action Chicks is a groundbreaking collection highlighting the heroines who fascinate us. What can they tell us about how popular culture depicts women? Do the characters escape traditional gender role expectations? Or do they adhere to sexual, racial, ethnic, and class stereotypes? The essays in Action Chicks provide a new look at these icons and their relationship to the popular media machine. This is a thought-provoking anthology that is bound to change how we think about gender and toughness. Softcover, 293 pp. $27.95.

Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism
Linda M. Scott
A pointed attack on feminism's requisite sense of style (or lack thereof) Fresh Lipstick argues that wearing high heels and using hair curlers does not deny you the right to seek advancement, empowerment, and equality. Marching through 150 years of American dress history, Scott rips down feminism's favorite positions on fashion, and asserts that judging someone on her fashion choices is as detrimental to advancement as judgements based on race, nationality, or social class. Illuminating and provocative, Fresh Lipstick will fascinate anyone with an interest in fashion and feminism. Hardcover, 356 pp. $35.95.

The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century
Robert McChesney, Russell Newman & Ben Scott
With the American political landscape dominated by the influence of big business, the timing of The Future of Media could hardly be more precipitous. Endlessly pressured by lobbyists payrolled by corporate broadcasters, Congress is poised to reopen the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which will reshape every facet of our media as we know it for decades to come. From cutting edge analysis to blueprints for action, this anthology presents a diverse collection of voices from today's growing media reform movement. Softcover, 376 pp. $26.50.

Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment
Harold Schechter
Does violent entertainment corrupt the young, turning them into numb zombies -- or worse, criminals? In this cogent, thoroughly researched book, American pop-culture expert Harold Schechter argues that exactly the opposite is true: a basic human need is given an outlet through violent images in popular media. From the depictions of crime in Victorian "penny dreadfuls," to the graphically violent video games of today, Savage Pastimes offers a rich, eye-opening brief history that will make you rethink your assumptions about what we watch and how it affects us all. Hardcover, 192 pp. $35.95.

Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America
Morgan Spurlock
In this, his first book, Morgan Spurlock -- producer, director, and star of Super Size Me -- looks at why fast food is tasty, cheap, and ultimately seductive, and suggests what Americans can do to turn the rising tide of obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. Supplemented by the opinions of various experts -- from surgeons general and kids, to lawmakers and marketing gurus -- this witty but deeply serious book will appeal to anyone interested in our country's health, our children's, and our own. Hardcover, 308 pp. $31.00.

Media and Society: Critical Perspectives
Graeme Burton
This major introductory text provides a wide-ranging perspective on the media. Written by an experienced author and lecturer, it covers the core theory and discussion points surrounding the media and its relationship to society. Chapters cover the major topics that students are likely to encounter in their studies, including: advertising, approaches to film, soap operas, women's magazines, media and violence, news, globalization, sports, popular music, and new technology. Hardcover, 378 pp. $143.95.

Quality Popular Television
Mark Jancovich & James Lyons
This anthology of essays examines the new catagory of 'cult' television and the reasons for its emergence. Looking at shows as diverse as Ally McBeal, The Sopranos, Martial Law, Buffy, Lois and Clark, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The X-Files, this book identifies the particular qualities necessary for success and how they relate to issues such as the economics of network scheduling, the growth of the internet and contemporary debates about television audiences. Softcover, 204 pp. $30.95.

Blockbusters and Trade Wars
Popular Culture in a Globalized World
Peter S. Grant & Chris Wood
This is the first book to investigate where and how cultural products are created, why they are so different from manufactured goods and why they must be treated differently. Focusing on the market dynamics that drive ever-greater audiences to "blockbuster" films, TV programs, books and recording artists, the authors consider how international trade law can endanger diversity while examining how freedom of expression and cultural diversity are inextricably linked. Softcover, 454 pp. $29.95.

Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Me
Stephanie McLuhan & David Staines
This extraordinary collection brings together twenty of Marshall McLuhan's previously unpublished lectures and interviews -- the spoken words of a surprisingly accessible theorist and seer of the modern age. He comes across as outrageous, funny, perplexing, stimulating, and provocative. McLuhan will never seem quite the same again. Softcover, 317 pp. $22.99.

Big Brother International: Formats, Critics & Publics
Ernest Mathijs & Janet Jones
The television show Big Brother (remarkable for its multinational incarnations) is one of the key cultural phenomena to mark the move into the twenty-first century. Both scandal and commercial hit, it has revolutionized television practice, changing the status of live multimedia events and challenging cultural theory. Media scholars from around the world have collaborated to compose this integrated view on Big Brother. Softcover, 261 pp. $34.95.

Contemporary World Television
John Sinclair & Graeme Turner
What is happening in the area of world television today? With intense commercialisation and ever more open national markets, with technological convergence and the concentration of ownership, the international television landscape is changing at a bewildering pace and in a host of different ways. This anthology presents a unique overview of the questions that matter most in the world of contemporary television. Softcover, 131 pp. $37.95.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Joel Bakan
In this brilliantly argued account of the corporation's pathological pursuit of power, eminent law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin. Backed by extensive research, The Corporation draws on in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as CEO Hank MacKinnell of Pfizer, Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, and business guru Peter Drucker. Softcover, 228 pp. $24.00.

That's the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader
Murray Forman & Mark Anthony Neal
This book brings together the best-known and most influencial writings on rap and hip-hop from its beginnings to today. Spanning 25 years of scholarship, criticism, and journalism, this unprecedented anthology showcases the evolution and continuing influence of one of the most creative and contested elements of global popular culture since its advent in the late 1970's. Softcover, 628 pp. $46.95.

Sex Sells! The Media's Journey from Repression to Obsession
Rodger Streitmatter
From repression to obsession, Sex Sells! illuminates how the media's sexual mores have changed during the last five decades. Not only does the author examine the broad range of genres that have reflected this libidinous journey, but he also shows how the media have played a leading role in propelling the Sexual Revolution. Hardcover, 283 pp. $36.95.

Teaching Media in the English Curriculum
Andrew Hart & Alun Hicks
Teaching Media in English Curriculum investigates the forms and puposes of media studies at the high school level, observing lessons and analysing how they work. This book will enable teachers to plan for changing curricular needs by drawing on the experience of other successful English teachers. Softcover, 258 pp. $29.95.

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Last modified July 15, 2003 .
Please note that all prices are in Canadian dollars. All prices are subject to change without notice.