Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
14,661
result(s) for
"History. Popular culture"
Sort by:
Variety : an illustrated history of the world from the most important magazine in Hollywood
\"Variety is not only a fascinating look at the history of entertainment as reported by the world's most highly-regarded commentator of show business news, it is also a history of American popular culture, and a record of the influence and confluence of art, life, and Hollywood. Illustrated with hundreds of front pages, articles, and new and archival photographs spanning Variety's more-than-century old archives, it includes personal anecdotes written exclusively for this book by a host of well-regarded artists. Variety is a decade-by-decade documentation of the seminal moments in history, including how pop culture reflected and responded to such pivotal moments in time as audiences' move from vaudeville houses to movie theaters, the sinking of the Titanic, the invention of the summer blockbuster, global politics, war, the moon landing, technological advances and the ever-changing social mores that were both reflected by and influenced the world\"--Jacket.
Book
Supernatural entertainments : Victorian spiritualism and the rise of modern media culture
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism's rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism's explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
eBook
A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio
The behind-the-scenes story of how admen and sponsors helped shape broadcasting into a popular commercial entertainment medium. During the \"golden age\" of radio, from roughly the late 1920s until the late 1940s, advertising agencies were arguably the most important sources of radio entertainment. Most nationally broadcast programs on network radio were created, produced, written, and/or managed by advertising agencies: for example, J. Walter Thompson produced \"Kraft Music Hall\" for Kraft; Benton & Bowles oversaw \"Show Boat\" for Maxwell House Coffee; and Young & Rubicam managed \"Town Hall Tonight\" with comedian Fred Allen for Bristol-Myers. Yet this fact has disappeared from popular memory and receives little attention from media scholars and historians. By repositioning the advertising industry as a central agent in the development of broadcasting, author Cynthia B. Meyers challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcasting history. Based largely on archival materials, A Word from Our Sponsor mines agency records from the J. Walter Thompson papers at Duke University, which include staff meeting transcriptions, memos, and account histories; agency records of BBDO, Benton & Bowles, Young & Rubicam, and N. W. Ayer; contemporaneous trade publications; and the voluminous correspondence between NBC and agency executives in the NBC Records at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Mediating between audiences' desire for entertainment and advertisers' desire for sales, admen combined \"showmanship\" with \"salesmanship\" to produce a uniquely American form of commercial culture. In recounting the history of this form, Meyers enriches and corrects our understanding not only of broadcasting history but also of advertising history, business history, and American cultural history from the 1920s to the 1940s.
eBook
Tales of the Southeast Asia's jazz age : Filipinos, Indonesians and popular culture, 1920-1936
Luis Borromeo was the Philippines's \"King of Jazz,\" who at the height of his popularity created a Filipino answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. Miss Riboet was a world-famous Javanese opera singer who ruled the theater world. While each represented a unique corner of the entertainment world, the rise and fall of these two superstar figures tell an important story of Southeast Asia's 1920s Jazz Age. This artistic era was marked by experimentation and adaption, and this was reflected in both Borromeo's and Riboet's styles. They were pioneering cultural brokers who dealt in hybrids. They were adept at combining high art and banal entertainment, tradition and modernity, and the foreign and the local. Leaning on cultural studies and the work on cosmopolitanism and modernity by Henry Jenkins and Joel Kahn, Peter Keppy examines pop culture at this time as a contradictory social phenomenon. He challenges notions of Southeast Asia's popular culture as lowbrow entertainment created by elites and commerce to manipulate the masses, arguing instead that audiences seized on this popular culture to channel emancipatory activities, to articulate social critique, and to propagate an inclusive nationalism without being radically anticolonial. -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Pulp Surrealism
In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins,
the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of
psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side
of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and
sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this
insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political
preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in
this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an
interpretative history of the intersection between mass print
culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of
mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary
aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents
four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and
impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses
Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great
surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular
series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the
arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the
surrealist inquiry \"Is Suicide a Solution?\", which Walz juxtaposes
with reprints of actual suicide faits divers
(sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in
sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration
of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which
surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about
the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.
eBook
Retromania : pop culture's addiction to its own past
We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups ... But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?
Book
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
The First Edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ′consumer culture′ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. Updated throughout, this expanded new edition includes a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the First Edition. Among the most noteworthy areas discussed are the effect of global warming on consumption, the rise of the new rich, changes in the North/South divide and the new diversity of consumer culture. The result is a book that shakes the boundaries of debate, from one of the foremost writers on culture and postmodernism of the present day.
eBook
The mediatization of the artist
This book offers trans-historical and trans-national perspectives on the image of?the artist? as a public figure in the popular discourse and imagination. Since the rise of notions of artistic autonomy and the simultaneous demise of old systems of patronage from the late eighteenth century onwards, artists have increasingly found themselves confronted with the necessity of developing a public persona. In the same period, new audiences for art discovered their fascination for the life and work of the artist. The rise of new media such as the illustrated press, photography and film meant that the needs of both parties could easily be satisfied in both words and images. Thanks to these?new? media, the artist was transformed from a simple producer of works of art into a public figure. The aim of this volume is to reflect on this transformative process, and to study the specific role of the media themselves. Which visual media were deployed, to what effect, and with what kind of audiences in mind? How did the artist, critic, photographer and filmmaker interact in the creation of these representations of the artist?s image?
Book
Speaking Soviet with an Accent
Speaking Soviet with an Accentpresents the first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan. These clubs profoundly influenced the future of Kyrgyz cultural identity and fostered the work of many artists, such as famed novelist Chingiz Aitmatov.Based on extensive oral history and archival research, Ali Igmen follows the rise of culture clubs beginning in the 1920s, when they were established to inculcate Soviet ideology and create a sedentary lifestyle among the historically nomadic Kyrgyz people. These \"Red clubs\" are fondly remembered by locals as one of the few places where lively activities and socialization with other members of their ail (village or tribal unit) could be found.Through lectures, readings, books, plays, concerts, operas, visual arts, and cultural Olympiads, locals were exposed to Soviet notions of modernization. But these programs also encouraged the creation of a newfound \"Kyrgyzness\" that preserved aspects of local traditions and celebrated the achievements of Kyrgyz citizens in the building of a new state. These ideals proved appealing to many Kyrgyz, who, for centuries, had seen riches and power in the hands of a few tribal chieftains and Russian imperialists.This book offers new insights into the formation of modern cultural identity in Central Asia. Here, like their imperial predecessors, the Soviets sought to extend their physical borders and political influence. But Igmen also reveals the remarkable agency of the Kyrgyz people, who employed available resources to meld their own heritage with Soviet and Russian ideologies and form artistic expressions that continue to influence Kyrgyzstan today.
eBook